AMD Creates Radeon Technologies Group To Focus On Graphics

[przemoli]

If info about Dell involvement is correct this split may be mainly about getting additional funding. Nothing else.
However, what is left AMD?

CPU, RAM, SSD. What else?

Edit:
PS RTG will be still under overall AMD brand right? Its still AMD Radeon?

[edmon]

AMD GPU's is killing Nvidia's top end GPU's in DirectX12 at the moment.

ATI can't kill anything since AMD kills it when they brought it. Sad but true.

[chithanh]

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

He said it is too early to tell whether the difference is going to be disruptive.
But that heavy use of Async Compute will come, that is not uncertain.

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

Because gaming consoles?

Here is a partial breakdown of Ubisoft revenues by platform for their fiscal year 2014/2015, taken from their financial report (PDF):

PS4 32%
Xbox One 20%
PC 12%
(rest is Wii/Wii U/PS3/XB360/Portables/Mobile/etc.)

Also "not optimal" in this case would just mean it doesn't provide any performance benefit. However NVidia's drivers are broken so trying to use Async Compute would result in catastrophic performance.

[gigaplex]

I think the reason AMD was beating NVidia so heavily in one of those D3D12 benchmarks is (and please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere):

AMD's GPUs have separate graphics (do-everything) and compute-only cores, and the sum of those is greater than what a comparative NVidia card has in CUDA cores..

Are you sure about that? I thought they were unified shader cores.

[bridgman]

Are you sure about that? I thought they were unified shader cores.

Right. Unified shader cores but independent command processors for queueing work to those shared cores.

[bridgman]

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.

Sounds great but totally wrong. ATI supported development of open source drivers from Mach64 days through R200 and early R300. At that point we bought FireGL, picked up a closed source workstation driver as part of the deal, and started using that driver (which turned into Linux Catalyst) across the board for workstation and client.

[AJSB]

OOOHH YES, Nvidia is "so" "good"...

Some might know this...BATTLEFIELD 2...Black holes on the ground
Doesn't matter if you play in XP, W7, W8 or Linux via WINE....Nvidia NEVER fixed it AFAIK...

OTOH, playing BF2 under AMD iGPUs...ZERO black holes EVER, no matter playing in XP, W7, W8 or Linux via WINE.

Funny fact ? It's a Nvidia game

[Ancurio]

Are you sure about that? I thought they were unified shader cores.

Edit: Sorry, did you mean unified as in "unified graphics compute cores"? Because there's already the term "Unified Shader Architecture" which refers to running both vertex and fragment shaders on the same hardware units. But in any case, I do believe AMD cards have cores that specifically only have access to compute, not graphics.

But looking over this article again it seems I might have been slightly confused about the cores, since not each one of them represents a queue by themselves. Instead, queues themselves are represented in hardware as "engines" or "command processors". Crucially, earlier NVidia cards did not have separate graphics and compute engines, so the work had to be interleaved (which wasn't a problem because of the guarantees of OpenGL/D3D11 I talked about), but Vulkan/D3D12 exposes the engines directly as Queues, so AMD GCN cards can schedule both types of tasks in parallel.

However looks like starting with Maxwell 2 (900 series), Nvidia does have separate graphics and compute engines, so async compute shouldn't give AMD such a big edge when compared against that hardware.

[bug77]

Sounds great but totally wrong. ATI supported development of open source drivers from Mach64 days through R200 and early R300. At that point we bought FireGL, picked up a closed source workstation driver as part of the deal, and started using that driver (which turned into Linux Catalyst) across the board for workstation and client.

Well, it's not totally wrong, because ATI/AMD's OpenGL performance has always lagged behind Nvidia's. And Catalyst releases have always trailed behind X releases.
While OpenGL performance issues I can understand, not having a plan to support X releases on the same day is just carelessness, imho.

[bridgman]

Yep, my bad -- I included one more sentence (at the start) in the quote than I intended.

I was just talking about your comments re: ATI and open source drivers.