AMD Creates Radeon Technologies Group To Focus On Graphics

[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.

[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.

[_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.

[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.

[duby229]

We don't really know that.

Yeah, that almost sounds like a bet.

[Anarchy]

If they're serious about Linux then it makes sense to continue with the oss path. Otherwise this is going to be the first thing that gets the axe.

[Ancurio]

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. When a game issues compute dispatches to a compute-only queue, these compute cores can work in parallel without stalling or taking up any of the graphics cores. NVidia's CUDA cores however are all do-everything cores, so when lots of compute tasks are dispatched, they take up entire cores even though none of the graphics functionality is used.

In D3D11 (and OpenGL) I assume the ordering rules for graphics and compute is the same as for graphics and graphics, namely that they must be logically sequential, so a draw call would have to wait for a compute dispatch to finish before being executed. In D3D12 / Vulkan, only operations queued on the same hardware queue have these ordering requirements, so a game can dispatch on separate compute-only queues (= Async Compute).

[johnc]

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.

We don't really know that.

[chithanh]

The Fury X is the same as the 980 Ti in that benchmark. It's hard to imagine that's "killing" nvidia.

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.

Here is what a developer from Oxide Games wrote:

I suspect that one thing that is helping AMD on GPU performance is D3D12 exposes Async Compute, which D3D11 did not. Ashes uses a modest amount of it, which gave us a noticeable perf improvement. It was mostly opportunistic where we just took a few compute tasks we were already doing and made them asynchronous, Ashes really isn't a poster-child for advanced GCN features.

[Daktyl198]

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

AMD/ATI has always had as-good-as and sometimes better hardware than nVidia, the biggest difference is that nVidia cares about their drivers a LOT more than AMD does. With DX12 and Vulkan, AMD's hardware will have the chance to shine through without their crappy drivers getting in the way...