AMD Unveils New Family of GPUs: Radeon R5, R7, R9 With BF 4 Preorder Bundle 188
MojoKid writes "AMD has just announced a full suite of new GPUs based on its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The Radeon R5, R7, and R9 families are the new product lines aimed at mainstream, performance, and high-end gaming, respectively. Specs on the new cards are still limited, but we know that the highest-end R9 290X is a six-billion transistor GPU with more than 300GB/s of memory bandwidth and prominent support for 4K gaming. The R5 series will start at $89, with 1GB of RAM. The R7 260X will hit $139 with 2GB of RAM, the R9 270X and 280X appear to replace the current Radeon 7950 and 7970 with price points at $199 and $299, and 2GB/3GB of RAM, and then the R9 290X, at an unannounced price point and 4GB of RAM. AMD is also offering a limited preorder pack, that offers Battlefield 4 license combined with the graphics cards, which should go on sale in the very near future. Finally, AMD is also debuting a new positional and 3D spatial audio engine in conjunction with GenAudio dubbed 'AstoundSound,' but they're only making it available on the R9 290X, R9 280X, and the R9 270X."
without decent drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
that work reliably for more than the current crop of just released games, I don't care how much faster these chips are. I've had too many glitches with radeon drivers over the years to consider them again. Their opengl is horrible, and CCC is a bloated pos.
Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that OpenGL and DirectX are the fastest? Because Fortran code sure is.
Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement (Score:4, Insightful)
And Nvidia has been crushing AMD/ATI in the PC market for a while (the Steam hardware survey shows 52.38% Nvidia to 33.08% AMD/ATI with 14% Intel).
Hopefully this will even things out some but I don't see it making OpenGL or DirectX obsolete.
OpenGL and DirectX have so much momentum and market share that game devs are going to have to target and support them for a while yet.
Also, until we get more solid details about Mantle we won't know how good it really is. I am cautiously optimistic but at most this will cause me to delay my next video card purchase until things shake out.
Re:New Family, My Ass (Score:4, Insightful)
nVidia is famous for rebadging. I'll give an example: the Geforce 8800GTX became the 9800 GTX, and then the GTS 250.
ATI on the other hand, has followed a different pattern. All cards of a series (HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, etc) are based on the same tech. The 6xxx series cards were tuned versions of the 5xxx cards, and I think what's happening is the new R-series cards are tuned versions of the 7xxx series. nVidia does this with their cards now too - the Fermi family (4xx and 5xx) and Kepler family (6xx and 7xx) introduce a chip in the first gen, and refine that chip in the second.
Re:Today I learned (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean today you just crawled out of your hole, considering AMD has all three consoles, and they're about to drop a brand new graphic architecture to the table.
Re:without decent drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
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- In case you meant to refer to C#, no part of this development process is "point-and-click". In this regard, it is no different to C++ (I develop in both).
- It is not interpreted. Nor has it ever been.
- I think you'll find that the simple programs of "a few dozen lines" that you mention would likely be smaller (3 of lines) in C# than C++. But, again, this is a silly comparison and shouldn't be used in any reasonable comparison. If things like this are a problem, you are just using the wrong libraries; in most cases it has little to do with the language directly.
Re:Now I feel like a fool (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, good luck with that. Of course it is BGA, do they even make modern RAM in anything else these days? I think it is even part of the GDDR spec at this point, but there are so many pins, and the industry is all about density, so the chips are going to be *GA of some variety. So yeah, toaster oven, after you have disassembled the card to remove the melty plastic bits, then you get to put it back together and find out it doesn't work because it didn't reflow properly. I suppose with proper investment in your toaster oven controller you could get something proximate to an appropriate flow profile, but that is far from a guarantee of success. You won't have the xray, and while JTAG adapters are cheap and plentiful, good luck getting a JTAG pinout from , so even knowing if its at all correct is a stretch, and at the speeds they use as mentioned above these things are quite sensitive to the quality of the joint. If you don't get it right on your first go, you'll probably pull some pads trying to rework it. I would put my money on the card, the ram, or both being ruined as opposed to success - unless doing this sorta thing is your day job. You are right in that it can be tricky to get your hands on a small quantity of parts, but I have had good success getting samples if you put some effort into it (some things are rather simple to get with web order forms, but you won't find that for Samsung and the like- probably gotta go old school and reach into the sales channels). That being said, they probably have something like 4-8 chips (4Gb I think is towards the high end of available densities) and I've never had anyone offer me more than 5 in samples (not that I've asked).
Worth it? You'll spend more breaking stuff than it would have cost to just buy it with what you want.
FTR, soldering normal SMD packages doesn't scare me, SOIC and the like aren't so much trouble. I'd even be willing to give *GA a shot - if I was starting from a bare board and could afford to chuck a bunch of them.
Re:Mantle API (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now,...
There are only two operating systems in widespread use now, so I should go write my new software in .Net and Objective C/Cocoa? There is only one Office Producitivity software suite in widespread use now, so I should release documents in .docx format? There is only one web browser, so I should only test sites in IE and ignore the standards?
The more we entrench the already-entrenched mono/duopolies, the harder it will be to get out of that mess.