RTG3rd March – Will Discuss Polaris, Fury X2, VR, DirectX 12 and More

[tential]

I think the right play after the 290 reviews would be to spec out a 290 equivalent to the 7970 GHz edition and require a cooler capable of keeping it from throttling under a given sound level that aftermarket coolers could hit, and seeding review sites with them. That would've kept the 290 much stronger, probably made the OEMs happy since they could have a way to increase the value of their product, and put them in a much better position to withstand the 970.

Nope. Still holds the 200 series name.
300 series implies new product to a consumer that has less association with the old line.
a 200 Ghz edition that requires a cooler wouldn't have mattered. It would have actually had polarizing effects (lol Polaris). People who did their resesarch would have bought it. Those who didn't would naturally assume it's a R9 200 series that runs even HOTTER than the ones that were already running hot.

Not to mention those who couldn't afford the R9 290 Ghz, so drop down to the R9 290 to find out it runs hot and terrible and then ditch AMD entirely?

Ditching it and rebranding as a 300 series and dropping the reference cooler is the right move. It just needed to happen sooner.

 

[MrTeal]

It scale as a power law, one must increase power by 21% to increase frequency by 10%, but SP count allow increasing perf as a linear function of power, that s why the GT980 being ahead of the 980TI is boggus unless the latter was heavily overclocked but not the former.

Why is it bogus? If you're sitting there running CUDA code, a downclocked 980Ti running the same number of FLOPS as an overclocked 980 would obviously have better performance per what. If you run most shipping 980s and 980 Tis at their stock clocks (which are similar between the models), you would expect perf/W to be similar between the two.

Pure GPU code isn't the same as a game though.

Perf/W can be skewed by situations where a much larger GPU performs no better than a smaller one.

 

[3DVagabond]

Nope. Still holds the 200 series name.
300 series implies new product to a consumer that has less association with the old line.
a 200 Ghz edition that requires a cooler wouldn't have mattered. It would have actually had polarizing effects (lol Polaris). People who did their resesarch would have bought it. Those who didn't would naturally assume it's a R9 200 series that runs even HOTTER than the ones that were already running hot.

Not to mention those who couldn't afford the R9 290 Ghz, so drop down to the R9 290 to find out it runs hot and terrible and then ditch AMD entirely?

Ditching it and rebranding as a 300 series and dropping the reference cooler is the right move. It just needed to happen sooner.

AMD should have learned that when they released the 7970GHz vs. 770. The 770 was touted as new and people ate it up. 7970GHz was just an O/C'd 7970

 

[Stuka87]

AMD should have learned that when they released the 7970GHz vs. 770. The 770 was touted as new and people ate it up. 7970GHz was just an O/C'd 7970

They did, they now change the names. 7970, 7970Ghz, 280X, 380X, all based on the same Tahiti chip.

 

[crisium]

They did, they now change the names. 7970, 7970Ghz, 280X, 380X, all based on the same Tahiti chip.

380X is not Tahit, it is Tonga. They have similar performance due to the same amount of CUs and ROPs, but there are several relevant changes from GCN 1.0 to 1.2.

 

[railven]

AMD should have learned that when they released the 7970GHz vs. 770. The 770 was touted as new and people ate it up. 7970GHz was just an O/C'd 7970

They did, they now change the names. 7970, 7970Ghz, 280X, 380X, all based on the same Tahiti chip.

If I recall 770 was more akin to 390, since it had faster RAM and I believe because of process maturity it also had higher clocks and less power consumption (let me double check...yerp and yerp, granted that second yerp is barely.)

Also the 770 sported that "flavor of the month" Titan cooler that review sites were still salivating over. 7970 Ghz was basically just an OC'ed 7970 with the same dinky cooler (which did it no favors) and higher power consumption.

Credit where credit is due, the GTX 770 was as much a "new product" as the R9 390 were.

 

[tential]

If I recall 770 was more akin to 390, since it had faster RAM and I believe because of process maturity it also had higher clocks and less power consumption (let me double check...yerp and yerp, granted that second yerp is barely.)

Also the 770 sported that "flavor of the month" Titan cooler that review sites were still salivating over. 7970 Ghz was basically just an OC'ed 7970 with the same dinky cooler (which did it no favors) and higher power consumption.

Credit where credit is due, the GTX 770 was as much a "new product" as the R9 390 were.

I don't think anyone is disputing that. I think they're all in fact agreeing with it.

Renaming the GTX 680 to the GTX 770 was smart.
Renaming the R9 290 to the R9 390 to fill out the new R9 lineup launch was smart...

In short, relaunching GPUs works...

 

[MrTeal]

AMD should have learned that when they released the 7970GHz vs. 770. The 770 was touted as new and people ate it up. 7970GHz was just an O/C'd 7970

They did, they now change the names. 7970, 7970Ghz, 280X, 380X, all based on the same Tahiti chip.

If I recall 770 was more akin to 390, since it had faster RAM and I believe because of process maturity it also had higher clocks and less power consumption (let me double check...yerp and yerp, granted that second yerp is barely.)

Also the 770 sported that "flavor of the month" Titan cooler that review sites were still salivating over. 7970 Ghz was basically just an OC'ed 7970 with the same dinky cooler (which did it no favors) and higher power consumption.

Credit where credit is due, the GTX 770 was as much a "new product" as the R9 390 were.

It's not really a comparable situation though. The GHz was released 5 months after the 7970, and other that the introduction of a boost clock it was just the refresh of the existing top end part. It also sold for essentially the same price, $50 less than the 7970 at launch and a little more than the 7970 was selling for at that point.

The 770 was released 14 months after the 680, and at $400 it was $100 less than the 680 was at launch and still less than the 680 was selling for at that point. As you mentioned, it also got the new Titan cooler. Much more importantly though, it wasn't a refresh to the top part. Titan was creating a new halo niche at $1000 and the 770 was launched at the same time as the bigger GTX 780. It was just moving last year's top end down a couple rungs on the ladder.

The much more comparable situation on the AMD side happened 6 months later when they launched the R9 290X and dropped Tahiti (along with a nice price cut) to the 280X spot.

 

[crisium]

I don't think anyone is disputing that. I think they're all in fact agreeing with it.

Renaming the GTX 680 to the GTX 770 was smart.
Renaming the R9 290 to the R9 390 to fill out the new R9 lineup launch was smart...

In short, relaunching GPUs works...

It does. But I think it would have been smarter to rename the 290 to 380, and Fury to 390. They should have saved the Fury name for an actual halo product, now it is sort of diminished. Even if the 290X and 780 Ti somewhat hurt the OG Titan, at least it was the fastest card bar none for some time.

 

[tential]

It does. But I think it would have been smarter to rename the 290 to 380, and Fury to 390. They should have saved the Fury name for an actual halo product, now it is sort of diminished. Even if the 290X and 780 Ti somewhat hurt the OG Titan, at least it was the fastest card bar none for some time.

I don't disagree that there are still mistakes in this launch lol. I'd have done the whole thing differently even still. But it was a good move for AMD to do at least something sort of right.

 

[3DVagabond]

They did, they now change the names. 7970, 7970Ghz, 280X, 380X, all based on the same Tahiti chip.

They should have preemptively released the 300 series. Instead they ran with the 200 series and all the old reference comparisons and steroetypes.

 

[3DVagabond]

It does. But I think it would have been smarter to rename the 290 to 380, and Fury to 390. They should have saved the Fury name for an actual halo product, now it is sort of diminished. Even if the 290X and 780 Ti somewhat hurt the OG Titan, at least it was the fastest card bar none for some time.

Custom 780 ti smoked the Titan.

 

[cytg111]

Likely topics of discussion will most likely include Vulkan, FreeSync, GPUOpen, Polaris, Fury X2, VR, DirectX 12, and anything else you’re curious about.

Don’t ask about Zen. It’s still a super secret.

So, about Zen, is it on schedule?

(yes, i know it was on reddit)

 

[Madpacket]

So, about Zen, is it on schedule?

(yes, i know it was on reddit)

I'm excited for Zen but I wouldn't be surprised if they delay it another 6 months.

 

[thesmokingman]

It does. But I think it would have been smarter to rename the 290 to 380, and Fury to 390. They should have saved the Fury name for an actual halo product, now it is sort of diminished. Even if the 290X and 780 Ti somewhat hurt the OG Titan, at least it was the fastest card bar none for some time.

Custom 780 ti smoked the Titan.

Back in the day 7970s ran with og titans pretty well too. From ocn's old valley bench thread that Karlitos once ran.

5760x1080

1 CallsignVega i7 3960x GTX Titan Quad-SLI 96,7 4048

2 tsm106 i7 3930k HD 7970 QuadFire 94,1 3935

 

[AtenRa]

I'm excited for Zen but I wouldn't be surprised if they delay it another 6 months.

why ??

 

[Madpacket]

why ??

There's very little talk since the last quarterly report by Lisa Su unlike RTG which has been demod and there's very little to doubt Polaris's release this year. I have nothing to base this on (other than missing past release dates) but so far we only have "2016" as a release date promised. Given it's already mid March I would expect a lot more information about Zen given they have less than 9 months to release it. Perhaps they're just being very secretive but with a CPU that's supposedly 40% faster than Excavator I would think there would be more noise being made. I hope I'm wrong as we need AMD to nail this launch but given the silence I'm concerned. I have the same concerns for Pascal for the same reasons.

 

[AtenRa]

We dont hear Intel talking about KabyLake either, are you saying they will delay as well ???

Not talking about ZEN today could mean they are focusing more on products they will release before ZEN, like Polaris and AM4 APUs.

 

[Madpacket]

We dont hear Intel talking about KabyLake either, are you saying they will delay as well ???

Not talking about ZEN today could mean they are focusing more on products they will release before ZEN, like Polaris and AM4 APUs.

Good points, again just a hunch or guess and I hope I'm wrong. Intel has released like 3 or 4 new CPU's since AMD's last FX chip? We know they have a huge lead so I don't see why they would need to make a bunch of noise for Kabylake. I don't know, AMD hasn't released a performance competitive high-end chip in many years so they have much more reason to make noise and try to bring up their stock price.

 

[prtskg]

Good points, again just a hunch or guess and I hope I'm wrong. Intel has released like 3 or 4 new CPU's since AMD's last FX chip? We know they have a huge lead so I don't see why they would need to make a bunch of noise for Kabylake. I don't know, AMD hasn't released a performance competitive high-end chip in many years so they have much more reason to make noise and try to bring up their stock price.

I think AMD has wizened up on what to talk and when to after the furyX overclocker's dream statement. They have given conservative information gradually to keep up their stock price without creating hype. I expect information on zen when we reach Q4 since AMD has already told mass availability will be in 2017.