AMD Radeon GPU's Thread!

News 1:-

ASRock Teases Phantom Gaming Graphics Cards, Rumored to be AMD Radeon Powered

The company just published a teaser on its twitter page revealing a new graphics card gaming brand called Phantom Gaming. The video depicts a dual fan, black and silver, high-end looking graphics card.

The video gives no indication as to whether this graphics card is from NVIDIA or AMD, but if the rumors are to be believed we’re likely looking at an AMD Radeon graphics card here. The new cards are said to be coming some time next month, if the rumors are to be believed.

Whispers have been circulating the techsphere over the past couple of weeks alleging that ASRock may be entering the graphics card market soon in an exclusive partnership with AMD. There was speculation that this move may have potentially been taken by both companies in response to other AIB’s signing on to NVIDIA’s allegedly anti-competitive GeForce Partner Program which is said to preclude them from associating their high-end gaming brands with AMD.

With that being said, facts surrounding the whole debacle still remain a blend of mystery and a he said she said situation. What’s no longer a mystery however is the fact that ASRock will be entering the graphics card market. Despite some reports that have emerged in German tech media claiming that this isn’t the case, now we have definitive proof directly from ASRock that this is indeed what the company is doing.

News 2:-

AMD Discrete GPU Share Rises To Highest Point In Nearly 4 Years – Global GPU Shortage Crisis Continues

2017 has been an absolutely wild year for PC hardware and the discrete GPU market in particular. Not only has last year witnessed several major GPU launches, like NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070 Ti and AMD’s brand new Radeon Vega lineup, it also saw the highest demand on those high-end products we’ve seen in recent history.

Driven by rising demand in the growing PC gaming market as well as the rapidly growing cryptocurrency mining scene, GPUs have become one of the industries most sought after products. The explosive growth of cryptocurrency led to the biggest GPU shortage that we have ever seen as well as the highest and longest GPU price inflation in market history. Suffice to say GPUs were selling faster than NVIDIA or AMD could make them.
Photos of empty graphics card shelves at retailers, screenshots of massively inflated GPU prices and out of stock listings on online stores circulated for months on hardware forums and still continue to do so today. Pictures that were once used jokingly to mock the sad state of affairs of the market, have evolved to embody a true pain that PC hardware enthusiasts are feeling all over the globe. Building your own gaming system is simply no longer a feasible option. This depressingly true statement is one that I had never imagined I would write.

AMD Discrete GPU Share Rises To Its Highest Level In Nearly 4 years
Needless to say though, this incredible demand on GPUs from cryptocurrency miners, while seen as a scourge by gamers, has been and continues to be bliss for GPU makers. Especially so for AMD, the underdog in a vicious market duopoly.

Discrete GPU
Market Share
Q4 2017 Q3 2017 Q4 2016
AMD 33.7% 27.2% 29.5%
NVIDIA 66.3% 72.8% 70.5%

According to the latest discrete GPU market share report from Jon Peddie research via Anandtech, AMD grew its share from 27.2% in Q3 of 2017, to 33.7% in Q4 2017. Which represents nearly a 24% increase in the company’s GPU unit shipments, one of the largest jumps recorded in the company’s recent history.


The Vega launch was by no means AMD’s most successful, and the graphics architecture itself isn’t the most competitive we’ve seen from the company. With that being said, Vega cards are incredible mining GPUs. And if your hardware happens to be a money printing machine, you’ll find yourself inclined to overlook its many shortcomings.

Retailers today are selling Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 cards at more than two times their original MSRPs and are still struggling to keep up with demand. The cards are gone faster than retailers are able to restock.

No Signs of Reprieve Any Time Soon
A short-term market demand blip has developed into a worldwide shortage crisis. It’s been nearly 9 months since the shortage started and there are no signs for reprieve any time soon.

According to AMD, their GPU manufacturing is currently limited by a shortage in the memorysupply chain, but may also soon hit another setback with silicon wafer supply. Major fabs announced earlier last month that they will be increasing their wafer order prices by no less than 20%.

NVIDIA has also recently stated that we may not see GPU price normalization until at least the end of Q3 this year. No matter who we ask, we just can’t seem to find any hopeful news. So buckle up folks, looks like 2018 is going to be a painful one.

 

AMD’s Next-Generation Navi GPU Could Ship by Late 2018

AMD’s Navi has been of interest to AMD fans since it first popped up on roadmaps, with hints of a next-generation memory subsystem and a “scalability” option that might be similar to the modular GPU designs that Nvidia is supposedly considering for its own products. First, the hints. As Hot Hardware reports, some driver notes for a Linux driver update back in July that were recently discovered reported:

[WARNING]: Should use –pci when using create_asic_from_script()
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET => 0x12345670
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable[0:0]




GFX10 is a Navi reference, and there are plenty of other hints to ongoing Navi work at AMD, from a job opening for a senior ASIC design and layout engineer (Shanghai, China) to various statements from AMD that it’s working on 7nm ramps already (the remarks date to May of this year). A Navi tape-out now or in the next few months would clear the way for a professional product introduction late next summer or fall, with consumer cards arriving a few months later.

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-cont...s-next-gen-navi-gpu-launching-august-2018.png



As for what the GPU will be, that’s anyone’s guess. AMD and Nvidia have both made noise about scalability and building distributed GPUs, but such designs come with a lot of potential issues that need to be addressed. GPU internal bandwidth is much, much higher than what we’ve seen in multi-core CPUs interconnects — think along the lines of 300GB/s, as opposed to 30GB/s. Building an interconnect that could keep all the subdivided GPU components suitably fed would be a very careful balancing act. I’m not suggesting that NV, AMD, or both won’t build it, but it may not be an easy road to delivery.

Frankly, I’m not sure now is the right time for AMD to be clever as far as GPU design is concerned. HBM and HBM2 may have delivered some benefits to AMD’s overall power consumption profile, but the company has had to push all of its GPU designs extremely hard to match Nvidia’s performance going back as far as Hawaii in 2013. Granted, Vega doesn’t hit the 95C temperatures that Hawaii did, but AMD didn’t really deliver the performance or power consumption that people were hoping for in 2017, either. If Navi cleans up cruft in the Vega design and delivers a large performance uplift thanks to further design refinements, so much the better, even if it isn’t a brand-new architecture or major design shift compared with Vega. Either way, repeated rumors are pointing to 2H 2018 for a refresh from Team Red.

 

Asrock rumours were including them making MXM boards weren't they?

Cool.

But the problem with AMD's market share data remains (just as it was with their CPU market pre-Ryzen): majority low end budget stuff with very little margin for them. Apple pay stuff all for their Polaris chips for example. While Nvidia is laughing selling every pascal chip they are still fabbing nearly 2 years on. Even at ridonkulous end user prices.

 

Something that wont change even post-ryzen for AMP

 

AMD announces two new VPs of Radeon graphics, filling void left by Raja Koduri

Remember when AMD's graphics chief left for Intel? AMD has announced the appointment of two new Senior Vice Presidents to take over and assuage fears that Radeon's development might suffer such a high-profile loss. The two new Radeon heads will both be taking on Senior Vice President roles at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group. Mike Rayfield is the new Senior Vice President and General Manager, while David Wang is Senior Vice President of Engineering.

"Mike will be responsible for strategy and business management for RTG, including consumer and professional graphics as well as our semi-custom products," the press release reads. "[David's] past roles at AMD included the position of corporate vice president responsible for SOC development of processor products, including GPUs, CPUs and APUs."

In short, it's good news for AMD, and very good news for anyone worried about the Radeon group's future. With the departure of such a high-profile figure like Raja Koduri -- to competitor Intel, no less -- the Radeon group could have been left in a precarious position with regards to its ongoing development efforts. These two new hires -- well, one hire, and one promotion -- make it clear that AMD has no intention of losing ground to Nvidia or other competitors in the graphics market.

“Mike and David are industry leaders who bring proven track records of delivering profitable business growth and leadership product roadmaps,” said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “We enter 2018 with incredible momentum for our graphics business based on the full set of GPU products we introduced last year for the consumer, professional, and machine learning markets. Under Mike and David’s leadership, I am confident we will continue to grow the footprint of Radeon across the gaming, immersive, and GPU compute markets.”

The press release goes on to describe how Mike Rayfield and David Wang will help usher in a new era for the Radeon group and it's not wrong. The market for graphics cards is currently getting a little weird. With cryptocurrency miners crowding out enthusiasts, and prices skyrocketing, the development of new and innovative GPU solutions is something every PC enthusiast should keep an eye on.

 

AMD's Project ReSX makes ultra-popular games smoother and faster on Radeon graphics
Harder, better, faster, stronger

AMD released Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.3.1 late on Monday with support for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition and Warhammer: Vermintide 2. Providing day-one drivers for such hotly anticipated games proves yet again that Radeon has left its dark days of buggy, late software far in the rearview mirror, but newfound optimizations for e-sports games are even more intriguing.

Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.3.1 marks the debut of Project ReSX (“Radeon eSports Experience”). “The goal of this project was to optimize the performance of some of the most popular PC games in the world on Radeon graphics cards,” AMD says. The company worked with developers for in-game optimizations, and tweaked its drivers to support the initiative. Result? Smoother Gameplay from day one!




Compared to the original Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition release, average frame rates increased from three percent in Overwatch at 1440p resolution to 11 percent in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at 1080p—but raw speed is only part of the improvements.

Looking at a game’s 99th percentile frames gives you a better idea of how smooth a game feels. This metric examines how quickly the slowest 1 percent of frames are rendered. The new Radeon drivers improve performance here too, with Dota 2’s 99th percentile score improving up to 7 percent per AMD, and Battlegroundsspeeding up by 9 percent. Finally, Project ReSX also reduced the click-to-response times in Dota 2 and Overwatch, minimizing the lag between the time you press a button and the game responds.

You can download the new software on AMD’s driver page, or by using the update function in Radeon Software. Last week, rival Nvidia released new GeForce drivers that also included day-one support for FFXV and Warhammer: Vermintide II, as well as up to 7 percent increased performance in Battlegrounds.