AMD Creates Radeon Technologies Group To Focus On Graphics

[duby229]

We don't really know that.

Yeah, that almost sounds like a bet.

[chithanh]

We don't really know that.

The Oxide Games developer said so in the same post:

Our use of Async Compute, however, pales with comparisons to some of the things which the console guys are starting to do. Most of those haven't made their way to the PC yet, but I've heard of developers getting 30% GPU performance by using Async Compute. Too early to tell, of course, but it could end being pretty disruptive in a year or so as these GCN built and optimized engines start coming to the PC.

[_ReD_]

To me it seems like they're moving the away goods before the CPU department went the way of the dodo dragging all the rest with it...
I love AMD CPUs and the idea of having a counterweight to Intel dominance, but it seems that AMD is not really fighting the CPU battle anymore.

[duby229]

To me it seems like they're moving the away goods before the CPU department went the way of the dodo dragging all the rest with it...
I love AMD CPUs and the idea of having a counterweight to Intel dominance, but it seems that AMD is not really fighting the CPU battle anymore.

You may be right. But I do think Zen will be decent. I don't think SMT is going to be anything at all what people are hoping for. It looks pretty good on paper though considering the architecture info that's out there about it. I still say the CMT architecture could ultimately scale higher, but that's just my opinion. There just isn't enough info about it to draw any real conclusions. But based on what I've seen it seems like the current CEO has a pretty good decision making record. We'll see what they can do when it comes out of the fabs. That may have already happened. I'd be interested to hear if there is any buzz about Zen. Does AMD appear to be excited scared? My guess is the sooner we get to launch day we'll find out.

[smitty3268]

The Oxide Games developer said so in the same post:

The developer you are quoting himself said it was too early to tell right in the quote you took.

I agree that the initial results are highly encouraging for AMD, but johnc is right that we don't know what will happen a year from now. Perhaps NVidia is still in the process of optimizing their drivers and the async compute won't be as much of an advantage by the time lots of games are actually shipping that use it. Perhaps they'll simply spread their money around to bribe developers to turn the feature off. That kind of thing isn't unheard of in the graphics business.

It's already pretty clear at this point that DX12/Vulkan are going to be a lot better for AMD than DX11 was, though. Drivers were always the biggest advantage NVidia had, and that gets minimized now.

[BSDude]

killing? there is no big games with dx12, and even today i can't play far cry 2 with AA enable with ati/amd drivers because of some bug, i can't read the letters in some games and install a driver (catalyst) in linux without become a nightmare,... i really like to see ati back, out off amd, complety out

Either your memory is short or you're just too young but Catalyst was shit from the very begining. During the ATI days it wasn't any better. For one, being part of AMD has put ATI on the path towards open-source. A slow, painful path but nonetheless the right one. No way ATI would have created OSS drivers as an independent company.

[wdb974]

A dogturd of a company with dogturd support levels. AMD explain why Nvidia 8000 series cards (3 years older) have a Win10 driver yet HD4000 series doesn't ? And don't get me started on HD4000 catalyst linux support.

I, for one, used to own a Geforce 8800 GTS (the G80 model; it died in 2013, probably due to bad solder joints) and I can tell you nvidia is no better. I used to play UT2004 a lot back then, and I was disgruntled when I found out the Geforce 8 series had driver issues with that very game. It took nvidia so long to fix it, I wasn't playing UT2004 anymore when it finally happened.

Also, if nvidia is so good with driver support, you should be able to explain why you can't find a driver for Geforce 6 Go series under Windows 7. All it takes is to add two lines to an INF files, and you're able to use newer drivers (newer than Forceware 9x.xx). So why aren't those drivers available? And why are the same drivers (up to version 304.xx or something) available for Linux then?

Third, I can't run Manjaro 0.8.13 only computers using Geforce 6 GPUs (affects both mobile and desktop versions) because KDE is either slow as hell (with proprietary drivers), or it's all garbled (with free drivers).

Anyhow, I see no reason to focus either on Windows or proprietary drivers here. This is a Linux website, after all. We should focus on open source software and participate as much as we can if we're unhappy with the current state of things.

[kurros]

It's a sign of things to come. Ashes of the Singularity does not use Async Compute all that much. When games start to make heavy use of it, the difference will become much more marked.

Why would game developers make "heavy use" of something that isn't optimal on the cards that 80% of consumers have?

[Pecisk]

Well, I don't know it means bad or good for Linux. AMD graphics products took some beating recently so more concentrated efforts are welcome. As long as work is done on improving Linux drivers (and there's some hope as we see new developments), I really care less. Yes, they are dancing around Microsoft and DirectX12 (and they clearly have to, as their market share shrinks very rapidly), but I don't take it as exclusive deal or anything.

[bug77]

The developer you are quoting himself said it was too early to tell right in the quote you took.

I agree that the initial results are highly encouraging for AMD, but johnc is right that we don't know what will happen a year from now. Perhaps NVidia is still in the process of optimizing their drivers and the async compute won't be as much of an advantage by the time lots of games are actually shipping that use it. Perhaps they'll simply spread their money around to bribe developers to turn the feature off. That kind of thing isn't unheard of in the graphics business.

It's already pretty clear at this point that DX12/Vulkan are going to be a lot better for AMD than DX11 was, though. Drivers were always the biggest advantage NVidia had, and that gets minimized now.

Oh, we know. A year from now we'll be talking about Pascal, no one will care how DX12/Vulkan works on Maxwell. Maxwell was built for DX11/OpenGL4 and that's where it shines.