The next gen gpu battle of the ages...

[Thor.]

Yup i am very, very confused right now, but maybe this will clear the battle field a little bit. So which gpu will win this next gen battle. AMD or Nvidia. :confused: :confused:

 

FIIIGHHHTT!!!

Nvidia gtx780ti specs are still unknown but say may be more powerful then the gtx780 with 4gb of ram.

 

http://www.hardcoreware.net/amd-radeon-r290x-hawaii-leak/

 

can't find the leaked specifications though for amd either. :confused:

Mantle to me is just a gimmick at the moment, sense ea and origin is involved, i want nothing to do with it, especially Origin. Never downloading that spyware ever.

 

Until more developers start using it maybe then, sooo, so confused :facepalm:

Edited October 22, 2013 by Thor.

[FiftyTifty]

Depends how you compare it. If you compare the 780ti in DirectX with the 290x in Mantle...It could be that the 290x wins by a fair margin. In a tit-for-tat DirectX comparison, they'll probably perform similarly.

[Thor.]

I feel sorry for those people with older Radeon cards below the 7000 series, even then the only card i can see registers the trademark next gen gcn architecture is the 7970. So it could very will be that card only and the new r200..

 

So i kind of feel left out as well if that's the case :verymad: that's not very consumer friendly. I have two radeon 7950's and it does not have that trademark, i did some major research in that particular field.

If the specs suit my needs, it doesn't matter the api at the moment, nvidia or radeon to me are equally good. Which kind of makes it hard right now, because I'm replacing my crossfire setup with a single gpu solution.

Edited October 22, 2013 by Thor.

[FiftyTifty]

Uh. The 7000 series GPUs make use of the GCN architecutre.

 

For example, the 7850, 7730, 7770.

 

You clearly didn't do research "in that field", or you need to work on your research skills.

 

And not consumer friendly? Tell that to the people who have DirectX8 cards. Or OpenGL 1.0 cards. Or Glide cards. Or DirectX3 cards. Or...

 

Edit: And yes, the api should matter. Take note that mantle is pretty much direct-to-metal, but rather than having to program "D2M" for every GPU out there, you just need to program D2M for the cards that have the GCN architecture; NVidia can make an abstraction layer that translates the mantle calls to their GPUs.

 

Though, NVidia would have to create new GPUs to include the hardware for this abstraction. Or they just make the GPUs around Mantle, in the same way that both GPU vendors do with OpenGL and DirectX.

Edited October 22, 2013 by FiftyTifty

[Thor.]

Okay then, i haven't come across any actual news regarding that, but i take your word for it.

Ancient history but you can still play those games under directx 8 and lower. Mantle is card specific, but glide is another story, sigh those voodoo cards where good for there time.

Also have a article backing up my first claim

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970-benchmark-tahiti-gcn,3104-2.html

 

Also it gives a very in depth view on how gcn works.

Edited October 22, 2013 by Thor.

[FiftyTifty]

Did you even check the AMD website? You know, the site which lists all the AMD GPUs and their specifications, including their architecture?

 

You're also basing your assumption that only the 7950 uses the GCN architecture, based off an article that was made before the 7800 and 7700 GPUs were released. Release dates here.

 

And yes, Mantle is direct-to-metal. *Cough cough*

 

If nothing else, the fact that the draw calls do not need to go through numerous abstraction layers and whatnot, will yield significant performance gains.

 

Take Skyrim for example. After around 2,000/2,500 draw calls are being made, performance plummets drastically. Why? Because the single-threaded renderer chokes out due to having to go through various hoops in order to get the GPU to draw a model.

 

Even if Mantle's only utilized for it's single threaded renderer (It can make use of as many threads you throw at it, provided the programming is there to make use of it), it will have significant gains. Various articles say that it's draw calls are around nine times less intensive than DirectX9/DirectX11's draw calls. Which means you can render more stuff at once without the framerate plummeting.

[Thor.]

No the 7970 i am basing it on, but i like a debate on the matter, it might solve it for once and for good, if I'm wrong.

Edited October 22, 2013 by Thor.

[Werne]

Uh. The 7000 series GPUs make use of the GCN architecutre.

Not all of them, the 78xx and 79xx were the only cards built on GCN until 77xx got out. The rest of 7xxx series is built on a different architecture. My 7770 has GCN proudly written on it, so I'd say Thor didn't do his research too good.

 

As for the poll, I'll go with R9 290X, even if it flops against Titan it's still a (presumably 600$) card that's on-par or faster than the GTX 780. Even if it only matches the performance of GTX 780, it would be a great card if it really is released for 600$ since it would be 50-100$ cheaper.

 

Then there's GCN and Mantle, which sound very appealing, especially if we see games made to use Mantle as the API. DirectX is inefficient while OpenGL is not being as innovative and fresh as it was back in the day (it used to kick DX's ass), if Mantle is as good as AMD presents it and if it gets used in games, you might be looking at a higher performance then what you have with the DX/OpenGL, which might just be enough to push ahead of Nvidia's flagship cards.

 

Also, choosing between those two is a bit dumb at the moment, seeing as how neither are officially released (Nvidia didn't even release the specs), so we can only speculate. Once there are actual benchmarks, then you can make a real choice, but right now it's practically impossible to compare the two when there's speculated info on one and no info what so ever on the other.

[FiftyTifty]

 

Uh. The 7000 series GPUs make use of the GCN architecutre.

Not all of them, the 78xx and 79xx were the only cards built on GCN until 77xx got out. The rest of 7xxx series is built on a different architecture. My 7770 has GCN proudly written on it, so I'd say Thor didn't do his research too good.

You do know that the only HD 7000 series GPUs are the 79xx, 78xx and 77xx cards? There are no other teirs in that series.

 

And your observation fits in just fine with their release dates. And no others are going to be released; there is a new series of GPUs out now.

 

Thor's research appears to just be reading an old report based on the 7950 when it was first released, and then assuming that it's the only GPU that uses the GCN architecture. That's not remotely researching which GPUs use GCN.

[Thor.]

The old report was based on the 7970, not the 7950 duh. Its the only

 

quote from article

 

 

While the Radeon HD 7970 is the first commercially-available product based on AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, the design itself is certainly no secret. In order to give developers some lead time to better exploit its upcoming hardware, Graphics Core Next was exposed in June 2011 at the Fusion Developer Summit. According to Eric Demers, the CTO of AMD’s graphics division, the existing VLIW architecture that was released with Radeon 2000 could still be leveraged for more graphics potential. However, it’s limited in general-purpose computing tasks. Instead of massaging old technology yet again, the company chose to invest in a completely new architecture.

More compute performance and flexibility are great, but gaming alacrity and visual quality remain the most pertinent responsibilities of high-end desktop graphics hardware. Thus, AMD’s challenge was to create a GPU with a broader focus, simultaneously improving the 3D experience. In order to do that, the company abandoned the Very Long Instruction Word architecture in favor of Graphics Core Next.

Edited October 22, 2013 by Thor.