PC Perspective Podcast #510 – 08/23/18
Join us this week for discussion on NVIDIA 2080 Launch, blockchain gaming, and more!
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Hosts: Jeremy Hellstrom, Josh Walrath, Allyn Malventano
Peanut Gallery: Alex Lustenberg
Program length: 1:24:43
Podcast topics of discussion:
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Merch! http://joshtekk.com/
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Week in Review:
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News items of interest:
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Picks of the Week:
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1:07:35 Allyn: Pretty decent color laser AIO
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1:14:15 Jeremy: I love 14cm fans!
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1:17:01 Josh: An underrated classic!
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1:19:10 Alex: MSD StreetFire HEI / Advance Kit
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Closing/outro
if the rumors from ppl who
if the rumors from ppl who tested ray tracing are true, then it will just be a gimmick for another decade.
who want to play a game at 1080p@30fps with a 1200$ GPU (2080 Ti), with noise artifacts here and there, it just won’t take off.
the idea is great though, i like it alot, but Nvidia just over sold it to oblivion, deceiving ppl with slides, showing X imes better perf, and not telling you that the actual performance is like 8fps on regular graphic and 20fps on a 2080Ti, that’s great and all but that is still not playable.
anyhow gonna have to wait for reviews, but i think nvidia over promessed, and ppl will end up greatly disapointed with ray tracing.
Beide i think Nvidia should have brought a GTX 2080Ti along with the RTX 2080Ti, because with all the tesla cores, that is just a huge fp32 missing that wcould have been a nice performance jump between generation, instead of sticking to 10-15% perf bump with a gimmick that won’t necessarily appeal to alot of ppl.
and…AMD come on, release something please.
AMD’s got nothing ready until
AMD’s got nothing ready until 2019 and Nvidia’s Ray Tracing in games has not yet been independently tested. Nvidia may not be able to convince gamers with its Ray Tracing IP but those RTX series cards with That IP will still sell to others looking to do non gaming graphics workloads that make us of Ray Tracing if Nvidia can help speed the actual Ray Tracing calculations up for even non-gaming/non-FPS oriented Ray Tracing calculations acceleration.
Ray Tracing is a traditionally CPU/compute workload and any AMD or Nvidia GPU of the last 4 generations with openCL or CUDA support can do Ray Tracing workloads on the GPU.
AMD had the same troubles with its Implicit Primitive Shaders and that was mostly in the code development category with the difficulty in converting, on the fly, any legacy Gaming Code so it could take advantage of Vega’s Explicit Primitive Shader hardware. Vega’s Explicit Primitive Shaders Hardware is still there for those games developers that want to target Explicit Primitive Shaders directly in any new gaming software.
So Nvidia’s Ray Tracing Cores and the Tensor Cores driven AI denoising that makes the Ray Tracing grainy output acceptable is still in need of some tweaking in some games. That’s no reason for gamers to be crying because they can still run their legacy gaming software on Nvidia’s Turing GPUs just Like any Legacy gaming software will run on AMD’s Vega GPUs without making use of Explicit Primitive Shaders.
Gamers are a little bit to obsessed with FPS and not enough thinking about other things mostly. And maybe the entire GPU industry needs to slow down its introduction of new hardware features and work more towards making those new features already introduced fully functional.
AMD should not worry about competing with only Nvidia’s Ray Tracing cores, if those Nvidia Ray Tracing cores are not substantially different from AMD’s nCU based commute cores! Ray Tracing being a compute oriented workload anyways that AND can accelerated on its ACE units with all those Async Compute capable Vega nCUs. Where Nvidia is ahead is with its Tensor Cores and that AI accelerated Denoising and AI accelerated Anti Aliasing. AMD needs to have some form of Tensor Core IP on its GPUs to run the Trained AI algorithms for faster denoising and faster AA, and other fast with low latency image processing capabilities.
Nvidia’s GPU prices are high and AMD needs Nvidia to charge more so AMD can come in and under-price those higher Nvidia prices but still be able to show a profit. So The higher Nvidia goes the better for AMD as even undercutting Nvidia’s prices by $50-$100 will still net AMD a fair markup on consumer sales to justify the expense of competing with Nvidia’s billions in R&D.
AMD is very correct in focusing no the Professional Market for Vega 20 at 7nm because look at the markups on the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Instinct MI25 Professional market GPUs that currently make use of the same Vega 10 die as the Vega 64/56. That’s a great markup that AMD makes and gamers would never pay that much! But maybe AMD should just tell the gamers to STFU or AMD will take RTG’s IP and use it mostly for the professional GPU market. AMD should charge more if Nvidia is charging more and maybe AMD will have the money to actually compete with Nvidia.
Gamers really think that all those software engineers and hardware engineers will work for burger flipping wages after all those years it took those professional folks to get their degrees, never mind the student loan debts they have taken on to get their degrees.
AMD, Stay on a Slower release schedule until the GPU prices justy your investments and continue to focus on the Epyc and Professional GPU compute/AI market. Use the professional GPU market sales to pay for the expensive R&D and use the consumer makest for any non-performant pro GPU Dies to be binned down and sold as Gaming GPUs. The Professional GPU market markups are too good to ignore while the crying gamers with no money to pay can be properly ignored! GPUs are way more costly to develop than CPUs and AMD should be glad Nvidia’s prices are so high.
The only GPUs that should be lower priced are the previous generations GPUs, but only after the next gereration GPU arrive.
I see Nvidia is forcing its AIB partnets to purchase more Pascal dies if the AIB’s want to be able to buy Turing dies. So maybe the AIBs should be making some dual Pascal Dies on a single PCIe card variants and makeing sales that way. Nvidia controls the Discret GPU market to such a degree that the AIB’s have no choice. AMD is setting pretty on its Epyc sales and that Epyc future looks bright, so does AMD’d professional GPU compute/AI products to go along with the Epyc CPUs in those Compute/AI cluster systems. So AMD can take its sweet time with Navi and Vega graphics is going to be on every Raven Ridge Desktop/Mobile APU that AMD sells.
Ray tracing in BF5 demo is
Ray tracing in BF5 demo is overdone. all the surfaces are WAY too reflective. In real life walking thru a parking lot you can barely see dull reflections on the paint of cars and puddles of water dont look like ultra clean mirrors. In BF5 turning raytracing OFF will be better to win multiplayer. less distractions/spot enemies easier/faster framerates. multiplayer is all about spotting enemies fast. They might be able to setup a few map scenarios where the reflections can help but in general it wont be useful, just more stuff moving on the screen to distract u from spotting the enemy.
When nvidia showed the Metro Exodus RTX demo my first thought was turning it off will be better because you can see enemies in the ceiling rafters.
Wikichip’s Fuse has a great
Wikichip’s Fuse has a great article about Raven Ridge for that presentation at Hot Chips 30 from Aug 2018(1).
(1)
“Hot Chips 30: AMD Raven Ridge”
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1596/hot-chips-30-amd-raven-ridge/
AMD’s New Vega dual die SKU
AMD’s New Vega dual die SKU that uses 2, Vega 10 binned dies 7168 Stream Processors and 112 Ccmpute Units and 300W passively cooled(Server Based Cooling).
“VMworld, Las Vegas, Nev. 08/26/2018
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the Radeon™ Pro V340 graphics card, a high-performance dual-GPU Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution purpose-built to power and accelerate the most demanding datacenter visualization workloads, including CAD, design, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and rendering.
The AMD Radeon™ Pro V340 graphics card is a dual-GPU solution based on the advanced AMD “Vega” architecture 1, optimized to deliver extreme performance and high user density for virtualized environments. It is the first VDI hardware solution equipped with 32GB of ultra-fast, second-generation high-bandwidth memory, providing massive amounts of memory and bandwidth for today’s most complex design and media workloads.
The AMD Radeon™ Pro V340 graphics card is enabled by AMD MxGPU Technology, the industry’s only hardware-based GPU virtualization solution, which is based on the industry-standard SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) technology. Combining software and hardware technologies that deliver virtualized graphics for the modern cloud, AMD MxGPU delivers fast, stable and predictable performance with the industry’s highest user density2, without requiring recurring end-user license fees… ” (A)
Also ” AMD MxGPU Technology, the industry’s only hardware-based GPU virtualization solution, which is based on the industry-standard SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) technology” (A)
Looking at some of the assoicated AMD pages on this SKU there is a very nice exploded view of this SKU that shows what appears to be the MxGPU ASIC also in addition to the GPU dies/Their HBM2. [See links provided on Press Release page]
(A)
“New AMD Radeon™ Pro V340 Graphics Card Delivers Accelerated Performance and High User Density to Power Datacenter Visualization Workloads”
https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2018-08-26-new-amd-radeon-pro-v340-graphics-card-delivers-accelerated-performance
i hope this is not an
i hope this is not an approuved AMD marketing.
Bcause going and poluting forums and posts with these kind of messages is counter productive imo.
Yes but it’s a Product
Yes but it’s a Product Release annoucement and even though the Marketing Speak is there the full set of Links To the Actual product’s specifications is also there. And even the whitepapers as of late are getting full of Too Much Marketing Speak(Gag Me With A Spoon) but Product Release News, even stright from the products maker is a valid source regardless of the annoying marketing speak.
If You Take the time to ignore all of the annoying marketing speak there is a complete list of available links that go into greater detail about the Product/Product’s IP, and AMD does need to get its whitepaper prodution up to Intel’s and Nvidia’s Level and that’s possible now that AMD’s revenue streams are increasing.
Now on to this Youtube Video from a Past Trade Show where Imagination Technologies(IT) is showing off their In GPU Hardware Ray Tracing capable PowerVR Wizard IP(1).
It’s too bad that IT’s Ray Tracing efforts did not get the market acceptance that it deserved but that’s what happens when there is not enough funds available to push adoption of any new Technology.
Many of IT’s GPU engineers are now working across the GPU industry and Nvidia has more resources to fund its Ray Tracing IP adoption. Now for AMD to come up with some of its own and there is so much IP out there related to Tensor Cores that no one entity controls. IT itself is still licensing its IP to others so the ChipWorks(TechInsights Inc)/Other similar folks will be looking deeply(With Electron Microscopes) at Nvidia’s Hardware Ray Tracing IP.
Really its the Tensor Core hosted trained AI that’s allowing Nvidia’s Limited Ray Tracing output to be of use.
Also note the numbers of gigarays that the PowerVR Wizard is making use of and that’s no small amount.
(1)
“Imagination PowerVR 6XT GR6500 mobile GPU – Ray Tracing demos vs Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND96G9UZxxA&feature=youtu.be
Also this Reddit post and
Also this Reddit post and forum(r/hardware) discussion is interesting as it relates to IT’s PowerVR Related IP and that’s interesting(1).
(1)
“PowerVR had a 6GRay real time ray tracing long before Nvidia (youtu.be)”
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/9akp0l/powervr_had_a_6gray_real_time_ray_tracing_long/
High performance Ryzen H
High performance Ryzen H Series Mobile APUs’ “Turbo frequencies” listed according to Guru3D’s article(1).
And don’t get your pantaloons in a bind desktop users about any 2800 numbering as these H series APU SKUs are for the Mobile High Performance Market! So Gaming Laptops maybe or some Mini-Desktop lower wattage SKUs.
And also What about that to be(Announced in Jan 2018) Raven Ridge Desktop APU Based ZOTAC ZBOX MA551 Mini-Desktop variant, It’s still very suspiciously MIA. Is Zotac one of those best friends that the big CPU/SOC Chip Monopoly’s money can buy sort of OEM!
(1)
“Turbo frequencies for Ryzen 7 2800H and Ryzen 5 2600H Surface”
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/turbo-frequencies-for-ryzen-7-2800h-and-ryzen-5-2600h-surface.html