New AMD Radeon "Polaris" GPU Details Revealed

[yogi_berra]

I'm waiting for AMD to live up to the hype of their powerpoint presentations.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I'm waiting for AMD to live up to the hype of their powerpoint presentations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3eQejGJ_A&feature=youtu.be

[bug77]

Well it was about time for one of the two big dedicated GPU vendors to officially confirm them moving to a node smaller than the 28nm TSMC one they've both been using since 2011.

Not holding my hopes up about better Linux support, but progress is always good no matter how far behind you are and Vulkan/Direct3D12 could to some extent reset the scales the same way Direct3D10 and Vista did on Windows.

What do you mean "about time"? It's been known for a while that AMD's next gen will be built by Samsung (14nm) and Nvidia's will be built by TSMC (16nm). 28nm has been with us for too long.

[Nille_kungen]

It seems like AMD is stepping up there game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3e...ature=youtu.be

That video should be in the article

[sabun]

Why would the performance-per-watt not improve for Linux when it is at the physical layer. The new 14mm FinFt process cuts down on leakage, so it has nothing to do with the OS

Take a look at the Intel Skylake CPUs. I too used to think that dropping to a lower die-size would help reduce power usage, and decrease TDP. However, it's not always the case. The new Skylakes run at 95 TDPs whilst my older 4770k runs at only 84 TDP.

The other features mentioned are hardware improvements as well. Since the amdgpu driver will be matured by the summer, when this hardware will be released, I wouldn't be surprised if even the video acceleration would work at/shortly after release.

To my understanding, the part about 4K HEVC/H.265 encode/decode support relates directly to VCE. We don't have any support for this currently on Linux (I believe there are parts of VCE support in the Mesa driver, but seemingly insufficient to be usable as FFMPEG still doesn't support it). Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.

[chithanh]

No, it's a free codec (BSD license). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9

There is a free software implementation of VP9, but the VP9 specification itself is still proprietary and controlled by Google.

[blackout23]

Unfortunately OpenGL driver quality will still matter for a long time even with Vulkan.

[sabun]

Unfortunately OpenGL driver quality will still matter for a long time even with Vulkan.

Agreed. Both the Crimson driver and RadeonSI need performance tuning attention, not PR powerpoint slide hype.

[whitecat]

I was browsing my favorite shop and listed the AMD video cards I could buy to play (Windows AAA games and Linux more or less AAA games like L4D2, Arma3, Civ5, Ark) on a lambda Fedora 23 computer.
Here is a sum up:

- HD 5450: too slow
- R5 230: too slow
- R7 240: too slow
- R7 250: probably good for non-AAA games but too slow otherwise
- R7 360: probably good for non-AAA games but too slow otherwise
- R7 370: most cards doesn't boot
- R9 270X: most cards doesn't boot
- R9 380: partial support (too slow)
- R9 380X: partial support (too slow)
- R9 390: too expensive
- R9 390X: too expensive
- R9 Fury (all flavors): partial support (too slow) and too expensive

[Nille_kungen]

What do you mean "about time"? It's been known for a while that AMD's next gen will be built by Samsung (14nm) and Nvidia's will be built by TSMC (16nm). 28nm has been with us for too long.

Is it known that it will be built by Samsung i think GlobalFoundries would fell more AMD to me.
Samsung might have better capacity.