Is AMD mismanaging Fiji? It can't be ROP ratio.

[jpiniero]

David Kanter says he think this too. Fiji got bottlenecked with Frontend, but as AMD ran out of die area they had to bake the chip this way.

I disagree, they could have cut some of the CU in favor of more ROPs. I'm assuming they did what they did to simplify and speed up development since Fiji is literally 2x Tonga.

 

[Mahigan]

I disagree, they could have cut some of the CU in favor of more ROPs. I'm assuming they did what they did to simplify and speed up development since Fiji is literally 2x Tonga.

Each of the 4 Shader Engines have a maximum of 4 RBEs containing 4 ROps each. Pending a completely revamped architecture, Fiji could not "add more ROps".

That being said, Fiji is not ROps bound relative to a TitanX. GM200 is bandwidth handicapped and can't even make use of its 96ROps. GM200 pretty much scales to around 64ROps worth of GCN 1.2 performance.

Both NVIDIA and AMD had to make compromises with their last 28nm GPUs. If anything though, Pascal might actually arrive with 96ROps as well but with more bandwidth to feed them.

 

[Silverforce11]

It will. Until it hits a hard wall due to framebuffer size, then it won't.

1. Assuming its dynamic vram implementation (2 engineers...) is no longer actively optimized for new games.

2. That 4GB isn't actually enough. At 1080 and 1440p? Unlikely anytime soon. There's already games with 4K textures that don't have issues with 4GB GPUs at those resolutions. What's next, 8K textures? You can't tell the difference at those monitor resolutions hehe.

Another thing to notice, Fiji does need AMD to release optimized drivers for game performance to improve over the 390X. Seen it in every AAA title this year so far. Hawaii performs like a champion even without game ready drivers, but Fiji is abysmal without it.