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Rumored specifications for HD8850/8870 - Launch January 2013 (?)

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SirPauly said:
Absolutely improve the experience for PC customers. Let's live an ideal world where the two companies don't do anything for the PC platform from a developer relations stand-point -- equal playing field. Oh wait, ports and more ports -- companies with competitive architectural advantages or software vision -- and customers that can't utilize them because it's not ideally fair for all or efficient for all.

Fidelity improvements that don't effect the fundamental game-play of titles -- no one is really hurt but consumers are rewarded, if they choose, to have more fidelity or immersion for their choice they decide upon.

Nothing is worse to me than buying hardware and a company not working hard to try to get their strengths in content in the life of the product. Some look at it as selling video cards - but it is defining the companies message; its brand.

Let's look at some of the driver sets from nVidia and how it goes beyond just performance numbers but adding fidelity or gaming experience potential for their customers.

Around May - drivers that did bring adaptive V-sync, FXAA and frame-limiters as far back as hardware in 2006.

Bringing Ambient Occlusion to Diablo 3!

Around June: Ambient Occlusion to Star Wars: The Old Republic and multi-sampling to Diablo 3 and LA Noire.

Around July: TXAA support for Secret World.

Around August:

Ambient Occlusion for CounterStrike, DarkSiders, Guild wars 2 and Mechwarrior

Multi-sampling for Darksiders.

This is not touching SLi, 3d vision support, multi-monitor, GPU PhysX goodies or developer relations.
Click to expand...

I'm sure AMD had changes to their 12.8 drivers too I'm just at work and can't list them here using a phone.
 
When asking the question of market segmentation due to PhysX, AO, MSAA (batman gate, cough), vendor-initiated gimmicks (GI in Dirt Showdown, CUDA water in JC2 etc.), one should also ask this:

If none of these initiatives happened due to IHV intervention, would the developers themselves automatically put similar things in their games on their own, benefitting all?
Personally I think the answer is a clear no. Why? Because it costs money and it doesn't benefit a broad userbase (the consoleros, IHV A/B, people with slower cards etc.).

So in my opinion these gimmicks are a good thing. They benefit at least someone as opposed to no one when they (and any hypothetical replacement) would not exist.
 
boxleitnerb said:
When asking the question of market segmentation due to PhysX, AO, MSAA (batman gate, cough), vendor-initiated gimmicks (GI in Dirt Showdown, CUDA water in JC2 etc.), one should also ask this:

If none of these initiatives happened due to IHV intervention, would the developers themselves automatically put similar things in their games on their own, benefitting all?
Personally I think the answer is a clear no. Why? Because it costs money and it doesn't benefit a broad userbase (the consoleros, IHV A/B, people with slower cards etc.).

So in my opinion these gimmicks are a good thing. They benefit at least someone as opposed to no one when they (and any hypothetical replacement) would not exist.
Click to expand...

Besides PhysX none of the features segment the market because both brands are capable to varying degrees and both capable of strengthening the areas where they are currently weak.
 
boxleitnerb said:
When asking the question of market segmentation due to PhysX, AO, MSAA (batman gate, cough), vendor-initiated gimmicks (GI in Dirt Showdown, CUDA water in JC2 etc.), one should also ask this:

If none of these initiatives happened due to IHV intervention, would the developers themselves automatically put similar things in their games on their own, benefitting all?
Personally I think the answer is a clear no. Why? Because it costs money and it doesn't benefit a broad userbase (the consoleros, IHV A/B, people with slower cards etc.).

So in my opinion these gimmicks are a good thing. They benefit at least someone as opposed to no one when they (and any hypothetical replacement) would not exist.
Click to expand...
Standardize all the gimmicks.
 
NIGELG said:
Standardize all the gimmicks.
Click to expand...

That would clearly be the best solution. But the most unrealistic, too (at least short to medium term). How happy would I be if at least MSAA were mandatory.

And just because something is standardized doesn't mean devs are going to use it. Skyrim@DX9 anyone?
 
boxleitnerb said:
That would clearly be the best solution. But the most unrealistic, too (at least short to medium term). How happy would I be if at least MSAA were mandatory.

And just because something is standardized doesn't mean devs are going to use it. Skyrim@DX9 anyone?
Click to expand...

Skyrim at least had the excuse of being a multiplat

A better example IMO is The Witcher 2, it was a PC exclusive for 1 year and required DX10 hardware as minimum, yet it was DX9 only
 
boxleitnerb said:
When asking the question of market segmentation due to PhysX, AO, MSAA (batman gate, cough), vendor-initiated gimmicks (GI in Dirt Showdown, CUDA water in JC2 etc.), one should also ask this:

If none of these initiatives happened due to IHV intervention, would the developers themselves automatically put similar things in their games on their own, benefitting all?
Personally I think the answer is a clear no. Why? Because it costs money and it doesn't benefit a broad userbase (the consoleros, IHV A/B, people with slower cards etc.).
Click to expand...

IMO, yes they would, but at a slower rate...

Companyes like ID allways tend to create a new tecnology, and crytec tends to push things to the limit...
anyway...there will always have someone pushing, and there will always have Bethesda...:whiste:
 
Silverforce11 said:
Ultra low current = mobile parts. Seems like AMD already have mobile refresh ready to go, with a launch next month. It's Korean.
Click to expand...

Right now i play bf3 on a laptop with NV gfx. Probably the the next laptop will also have nv hardware. The oem decides for me.

I work for company that is one of the biggest players in our market,- if not the brand. We got the doe for devellopment, building the best brand and having the huge bad ass global selling force. Thereby we always have the new technology first, the brand means we can charge 10% more for the same as the lesser competitor, and the sellingforce is just eaning the oem market big time.

Imagine how it is to be number 2?

R&D cost is always restricted
Your lower brand awareness means you get 10% less for your product, that can easily translate into 200% less profit or no profit at all if not a direct loss.
The OEM doors is closed because everytime you try to break into an OEM or a situation, your competitor always suddenly have a better offer. It mean the OEM always plans for your competitors future portfolio

For that last 3 years amd mobile solutions have been technically superior, and probably will be this time also. And they are just on the market months before NV. Will it alter something? If history is taken into account. No. Its just a pain to be the little player for the reasons shown.
 
Olikan said:
IMO, yes they would, but at a slower rate...

Companyes like ID allways tend to create a new tecnology, and crytec tends to push things to the limit...
anyway...there will always have someone pushing, and there will always have Bethesda...:whiste:
Click to expand...

id software...wasn't that the company that released this terrible looking game. Rage? Crytek has lost a lot of credibility with enthusiasts over Crysis 2 missing DX11 at first.
 
boxleitnerb said:
id software...wasn't that the company that released this terrible looking game. Rage? Crytek has lost a lot of credibility with enthusiasts over Crysis 2 missing DX11 at first.
Click to expand...

yes, shit happens...
but they still pushed the tecnology forward...
 
krumme said:
For that last 3 years amd mobile solutions have been technically superior, and probably will be this time also. And they are just on the market months before NV. Will it alter something? If history is taken into account. No. Its just a pain to be the little player for the reasons shown.
Click to expand...

At the risk of mentioning Nvidia b*gate yet again, I was shocked to see Nvidia back winning all those OEM contracts. But I do have a theory:
  • when a HP laptop with Nvidia graphics broke, consumers blame HP.
  • when a Sony laptop with Nvidia graphics broke, consumers blame Sony.
  • when an Apple laptop with Nvidia graphics broke, consumers blame Apple.
  • etc.
Because most consumers don't follow tech news. Still we have the irony of people saying NV is the premium brand. Yes, well every brand wants to be the premium brand and charge premium prices but when something goes wrong that you can see who really is premium: only Intel I think. You may pay more for Intel gear but if something goes wrong (SB-chipset, SandForce SSD etc.) they will sort it out even if it costs them.
 
boxleitnerb said:
id software...wasn't that the company that released this terrible looking game. Rage? Crytek has lost a lot of credibility with enthusiasts over Crysis 2 missing DX11 at first.
Click to expand...

Not sure if you're serious about id software, they have a signifigant history of constantly having the best graphics in games. Doom/Quake were far ahead of their time. Rage isn't great but it was focused on consoles, they never intended for it to be the best looking PC game.
 
They had, past tense. How relevant is that today?
My point is, consoles and costs hold development back and it is up to IHVs that want to sell their respective products to add their stuff - otherwise, no one will.
 
VRZone has an interesting article up which talks about AMD's 2013 and beyond graphics roadmap. Some highlights:
Oland should come as a 3.4 billion transistor chip, carrying 20% more transistors than its predecessor Pitcairn (HD 7800). The number of GCN units is not known at this time, but the performance is targeting GeForce GTX 680. Manufactured in 28nm process, AMD engineers worked hard on optimizing transistor libraries at TSMC in order to increase transistor efficiency, paying the price with an increased die size. This is the same path NVIDIA followed for years, sacrificing smaller die size for improved yields.

However, performance will take second place to the amount of architectural changes Sea Islands bring. First and foremost, Sea Islands will bring Unified Address Space between the GPU and the CPU. Furthermore, GPU will be able to page system memory using CPU pointers, bringing full memory coherency between the two. This is something even Intel doesn't have planned for its Xeon Phi (Larrabee / Knights' Corner / Knights' Ferry).

Sea Islands will spend better part of the year without the real competitor, as NVIDIA will only offer refreshed Kepler until Maxwell comes along. Also worth mentioning is that SI is the architecture chosen to be expanded into high-performance consoles, thus we should see quite interesting announcements regarding to vast compute and graphics capabilities carrying the next generation of console games. Bear in mind that engines such as Unreal Engine 4 do not work on contemporary consoles, while PC hardware can easily churn out those pixels in ultra-high details.
Click to expand...
 
AnandThenMan said:
VRZone has an interesting article up which talks about AMD's 2013 and beyond graphics roadmap. Some highlights:
Click to expand...

That article is saying that Sea Islands is going in to the next set of consoles? I just don't see it, even if both MS and Sony delay until early 2014. It would be seriously great, but I just don't see it.

Unless....... since they've had these contracts for a year or two now, they are developing the console GPUs in parallel with the Sea Island desktop GPUs with the two teams working together. I still doubt it, but it could be possible, especially since they'd only be aiming at low to mid-level desktop GPU performance at 1080p.
 
However, performance will take second place to the amount of architectural changes Sea Islands bring. First and foremost, Sea Islands will bring Unified Address Space between the GPU and the CPU. Furthermore, GPU will be able to page system memory using CPU pointers, bringing full memory coherency between the two. This is something even Intel doesn't have planned for its Xeon Phi (Larrabee / Knights' Corner / Knights' Ferry).
Click to expand...

Maybe this is why it comes at such a good pricepoint...
 
I'm still really happy with my 5850, I'm guessing I can wait until mid next year at this rate before I upgrade.
I hope there's some kind of 3gb 8850 or something like that around then.
 
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