Maxwell or Mantle makes you more excited?

I thought the same thing originally but since learning the steam prototypes have nVidia cards I don't think that's the case.
I'm all for mantle if there is something in it for nVidia too.

 

Valve themselves have said that Steam Boxes with AMD hardware will be sold too.

 

Yes your right. The point I was trying to make was that it almost made sense that the Steambox could have been exclusively for AMD cards and Mantle.

 

I don't think it makes any sense. You have to look at the big picture. Vendor exclusivity would completely go against the open nature of Steam Machines and would hurt its adoption by limiting consumer choice. The whole concept is designed to be an open collaboration between IHV's and ISV's. Valve's reference design Steam Machine has only Nvidia and Intel, but third-party ones can have anything since it's up to the builders what they want to put in them. This is why cross-platform and cross-vendor support for Mantle would be huge for Steam Machines.

 

That is nice, Mantle's start actually not too bad! We already know quite many games; Frostbite 3 games (15) + Thief, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Star Citizen and Sniper Elite 3 Afrika.

 

Mantle is gonna be epic!!

I bet AMD skipped properly competing with Nvidia this year just so they can focus on Mantle.

 

What do you mean? AMD was quite competitive this year. They on the desktop side the R290X forced Nvidia to come out with the 780 ti. And price wise, or price performance they are very competitive. One the notebook, the 8970 is very price competitive to the 780m. And they are competitive all the way down the various price ranges. And the console win is pushing some to buy AMD as well. So I would say it was a very good year for AMD. Now if they could get the heat and noise down...

 

I think he means that AMD has very few design wins compared to Nvidia on the notebook side.

Plus the rebranding the 7970m as the 8970m can be seen as a lack of effort on AMD's side.

 

Yep, exactly!

They could have easily caught up with the 780M by releasing a 8990M but they didint.

 

You make it sound so easy, but you're forgetting a few things. Nvidia has more segmentation in its product stack and GCN is less efficient than Kepler. AMD doesn't have a chip faster than Pitcairn that can fit within a notebook TDP. Curacao is just a higher-clocked Pitcairn. Tahiti and Hawaii are out of the question for obvious reasons. On paper, Tahiti LE looks feasible if clock speeds are reduced enough, but it was only used in 7870 XT, a very limited-supply product on the desktop side, so I'm guessing AMD doesn't have a bunch of that ASIC lying around if yields for Tahiti are good.

 

The Tahiti is less efficient, Pitcairn isn't (think about 7970M vs 680M, both ~100W). But the supply is probably a big problem.

Maybe AMD was thinking, hey, our 7970M is attractive enough with its price anyway. Let's just rebrand it with more VRAM.

Top-of-the-line aside, NVidia has a way more complete product line-up. For this gen's portable gaming notebooks (Blade, W230ST, etc), there's simply no AMD option even if they prefer one.

And I'm still not seeing a FirePro version of 7970M after the Radeon being available for so much time.

 

You're forgetting that GK104 is a higher-end chip than Pitcairn. On the desktop side, GK104 competes against Tahiti, not Pitcairn. Plus, GK104 is a bigger die than Pitcairn and the fact Nvidia was able to fit a bigger GPU into the same TDP envelope speaks to Kepler's improved efficiency. It's the same across each company's respective lineup, as reviews show Nvidia's products to run cooler and consume less power than their AMD counterparts. A recent example would be Hawaii vs. GK110. We've all seen how hot and power-hungry R9 290 and 290X run compared to GTX 780 and 780 Ti despite GK110 also being a much larger die than Hawaii.

 

I think in the long run Mantle is going be a bigger deal.

 

The bigger NV dies are clocked lower.

We're talking about notebooks here, and on notebooks, the high end AMD/NV products get very similar efficiency in terms of gaming performance vs power consumption. 7970M and 680M get similar FPS in most titles and power consumption is also similar. The 780M is faster but also more power hungry.

On high end desktops cards (Tahiti, Hawaii), AMD is kind of pushing it too far and efficiency drops.

It's natural for a smaller die to run hotter.

 

Hell no, when the top Radeon is not as efficient as the top Geforce, that does not mean Kepler is more efficient than GCN. Low and mid categories are also exist, actually these the most sold category! And I can tell in the mid range not exist closely as efficient Geforce as the Radeon 8750M! Or in desktop range many mid Range GCN Radeon more efficient than the most efficient Geforce, the 650ti;

 

This statement is a total fail. Smaller dies run hotter, because manufacturers clock them higher. There is nothing "natural" in it.

 

Can't read the writing. What is being shown by the graph? And where are GTX 660 and 660 Ti? Those are the direct competitors to 7870 and and R9 270/270X. Weird that they're left out.

 

It is performance / watt, sorry it was not English, just could not found English source with reference Radeon R9 270. Those Geforce probably did not fit into the graph because they less efficient as the 650ti.

 

Nope.





GTX 660 is just as efficient as 7870 if not more so.

 

It is not dividing performance with watt, it is just power consumption. Divide the shown FPS (in earlier page) with the Watt here!

 

Well they get almost the exact same FPS, so...

 

It is hard to judge from here, not sure if in the earlier page power consumption was measured with 1920x Ultra or 1600x High, not mention it is just one game. In my earlier graph they have combined many games performance with the actual power consumption.

 

Kepler and GCN entry-level and mid-range, e.g. GK107 vs. Cape Verde and GK106 vs. Pitcairn, are quite similar in terms of efficiency. But once we move to the high-end and extreme-end with GK104 vs. Tahiti and GK110 vs. Hawaii, Kepler has the clear lead.

 

How do you figure? Tahiti is bigger and warmer than GK104 because it had a ton of compute features tacked on, which GK104 was completely stripped of. Tahiti was also faster than GK104 after AMD got their act together with drivers. As far as GK110 and Hawaii go, GK110 is much bigger than Hawaii for marginally better performance. The only problem with Hawaii cards is the awful cooler, a problem that will completely go away when custom coolers are released by AIBs.

So I don't know quite get what you mean by efficiency. If anything, GCN is much more efficent at all levels at least in terms of area, even the midrange. See Pitcairn vs GK106 (easy win in all areas for Pitcairn despite being smaller). Area to area GCN rolls Kepler. Perf/watt is quite even however, with Hawaii and GK110 being closer with the edge going to GK110. With Mantle, GCN will probably easily win there too though.

 

Yes I was just about to add that bit about compute. Even though GCN wipes the floor with Kepler in compute performance, it's largely irrelevant for gaming at this time outside of rare cases like TressFX.

Efficiency is usually referring to performance per watt and operating temperatures.

And about die sizes, GK106 vs. Pitcairn is too close to call it a win for Pitcairn. 221 mm² vs. 212 mm² is nothing like the gulf between GK110 and Hawaii. I'll give props to AMD there for having the best performance for the die size, but they really need to get the heat and power consumption under control. I doubt it's as simple as slapping on a non-reference cooler and calling it a day.

 

I'm agree in the high end Kepler is better GPU, In meanwhile I've tried to prove in the mid range GCN better. I'm especially think for my Radeon 8750M, because even if I do full overclock the power consumption during gaming from Wall won't hit 60W (whole laptop) and I'm close to 750M performance. And when Mantle arrives, that just will further increase GCN Radeons efficiency in those certain games at least.

 

Efficiency means perf/power in this case.

Depending on many factors, using a small die clocked higher or a bigger die clocked lower can result in better or worse efficiency.

 

If the 450W+ 6990 can be tamed with a custom cooler so can the 290X. There's nothing they can do about power consumption without a new process. They pushed a smaller chip in an effort to beat a bigger one, and did not provide a cooler to match which I am pretty sure they are regretting in hindsight.

 

AMD reference card cooling has always been like that. Who cares.

 

Bumping this. I'm still excited about Mantle. I feel like it's definitely making some headway.

We already know that Star Citizen is on modified CryEngine and has Mantle support. At APU13, CryTek said it's currently evaluating Mantle and that "it's looking good so far." With Star Citizen being the biggest CryEngine-powered game to date, you just know that Mantle is somewhere in the discussions between CIG and CryTek.

I also found out today that the new Thief, already confirmed to support Mantle a while back, will be on modded Unreal Engine 3. This is exciting. If a studio can take an existing engine and implement Mantle into it after the fact instead of having to develop a new engine from the ground up (which is what it sounds like Oxide Games is doing with Nitrous), this could be huge.

Besides Frostbite, CryEngine, and Unreal, what other heavy-hitters are there?

Stay tuned.

 

I have just built a new full AMD gaming desktop in anticipation for AMD Mantel - the specs are in my sig. I was going to go NVidia, but really with the new consoles using AMD and with Mantel going to be used, AMD cards really have the advantage here for console to pc ports. Plus, it saved me a few bucks going AMD, so I just put that into an awesome case and more ram

 

Ah I see it in your sig now. Good choice! You're making me jealous now. I think I need to upgrade my desktop or build a new one pretty soon.

 

Without seeing a single benchmark? Jumping the gun a bit, no?

 

Yes, bring on the benchmarks already. I just bought a Nvidia notebook, so I don't think it will be that big a deal.

 

Well, even if Mantel is a dud, I still love the system I built and it meets all of my gaming needs so far - at an excellent price. Plus, as I said before, the consoles are full AMD CPU/GPU, so even if Mantel is a dud ports will in theory be optimized towards AMD pc's. For the same price I paid for parts if I went with the same performance from Intel/NVidia I would only have 16GB Ram and a lesser case.

I may not have that glowing "GeForce" logo on my cards, but the Gigabyte R9 270X's look like beasts inside my desktop, and the cooling/performance for the price really is unmatched compared to NVidia.

My Baby :

 

You won't have to wait long to find out.

Great graphics card p0rn. That is one sexy looking beast! :thumbsup: Windforce is one of my favorites along with ASUS DirectCU II and the Nvidia reference design.

 

I'm really excited for Maxwell to see nVidia's advancements in the 3D game

 

Such a sexy card.

Thats pretty much what I cann "run anything and smile" card.

 

Nice system, now you can do Bitcoin mining :thumbsup:

 

That is right, AMD cards great for mining due to strong OpenCL. By the way it is december and I wonder why AMD and DICE so quiet about Mantle...

 

Bitcoin mining is why stock of Hawaii and Tahiti cards have fallen off a cliff and the few remaining stock is grossly inflated. Back when 7950's were on sale for $150 there were people buying them fifty at a time and setting them up in their garages for mining.

 

Ya it sucks lol, my cards cost me $235 each, damn inflation

 

The BF4 Mantle release might be delayed, you know, like every other game. Not to mention they need to fix existing issues before adding more.

 

I doubt they'll be able to do that in time, they might just implement Mantle first to deter people for complaining about all the bugs lol

 

Hopefully they can get it right. I really want to see Mantle succeed.

 

Yeah same here, it will give AMD Radeons an advantage that they desperately need. In these times having a price/performance bonus isnt enough to get sales, their top GPU needs to perform closer to nVidias.

 

Mantle so BF4 will crash even faster!

 

Maybe their slightly stoned team of testers will notice the crashes then lol

 

270X should probably be very efficient in mining, it's not much slower than a 7970, at a much lower TDP.
Actually since ASIC systems killed bitcoin mining for most people, it is LiteCoin mining that killed the stock of radeons.
I am thinking about trying it on my 7730M, this thing should have great performance/watt.

 

Yes my mistake it's Litecoin not Bitcoin.