
Nvidia's new graphics cards are a big deal - doener
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/5/7/11615806/nvidia-gtx-1080-1070-pascal-specs-price-release-date
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Rafert
Earlier discussion about an article that goes much more in depth:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648110)

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optimiz3
I'm really skeptical these cards will be cost/perf competitive with AMD's
upcoming Polaris.

The 1080 is the only card with GDDR5X, which from what I've read has twice the
bandwidth of GDDR5. The 1080 and 1070 both have 256-bit buses, meaning if the
clock rates are equal, the 1070 will have half the memory bandwidth of the
1080.

In contrast, the _current gen_ AMD R9-290, R9-390 and higher have 512-bit
GDDR5 buses, and the leaked Polaris cards have 256-bit GDDR5X buses
(eqivalent).

AMD cards tend to be priced lower than NVidia cards, so we're very much in a
wait-and-see mode right now.

(We do datacenter level cryptographic compute and our workloads are very
memory bandwidth constrained.)

~~~
maaku
You do cryptographic compute. You're about the only HPC application that
benefits from AMD architecture. Most other scientific compute and deep
learning applications have horrible performance on AMD compared with NVIDIA
(usually for software reasons that are in principle fixable, but it is what it
is).

~~~
sklogic
There is a lot of applications beyond crypto that depend on an integer
performance. Even in graphics, not just scientific/engineering compute.

~~~
magicalist
sure, but if you're not integer performance bound, which most graphics work
won't be, it doesn't usually matter.

~~~
sklogic
Yet, a lot of stuff beyond crypto depends solely on an integer performance +
memory bandwidth. Graphics included. 2D image processing is better done in
integer or a fixed point.

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CoolGuySteve
I worked as an intern on some stereoscopic/multiview R&D maybe 12 or 13 years
ago. It was similar to the work in this video, except meant for
autostereoscopic displays like the 3DS and displays with more viewing angles
than 2. (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acIe1vlpd84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acIe1vlpd84)
)

The multiple projections feature is cool. Aside from saving the double
geometry/draw call overhead, they're probably also
clipping/transforming/rendering each stereoscopic pair of fragments at the
same time to encourage cache coherency and reduce bandwidth requirements on
the GPU.

Overall, the overhead of rendering the same thing twice from slightly
different projections shouldn't cut your rendering capabilities in half, it's
mostly the same stuff. So this feature should make a big difference for VR.

I was waiting for something like this from the Sony PS3 when they started
introducing 3DTV compatible games but I guess the market wasn't there at the
time for that driver development effort considering most of the games released
in 3D were PS2 ports. Seems like they missed an opportunity to have a killer
app for 3DTV, nearly every PS3/PS4 game could have had built-in 3D with only a
25% or so performance hit that can be compensated for with
downsampling/upscaling.

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deckar01
After adding a 4K display and Nvidia shield to my home theater I was a bit
disappointed that the recommended way to max out 4K games was two gtx 980ti in
SLI. $1200 is out of my budget, but I can't fit 2 cards in my micro ATX case
anyway. The 1080 is definitely going in my build.

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jdavid
Anyone know when the Mobile Fiji, Polaris, Zen, Pascal hardware is coming out?

~~~
onli
All but Pascal are only best guesses:

* Pascal will arrive with GTX 1080 end of this month, this is covered in OPs article

* Polaris is scheduled for summer/autumn, but as with Pascal the flagship models will come later

* Zen will be at the beginning 2017

* Mobile Fiji – no idea, have read nothing about

 _Edit:_ Just realizing that maybe you meant to prepend mobile to all of
those?

~~~
TikiTDO
Was Zen 2017? Last I saw had it dropping in October of 2016. I actually
decided to hold off on an upgrade for it.

~~~
onli
I'm not actually sure. It might very well be Q4 2016.

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xedarius
This is cool without a doubt. However it's fairly well understood that Nvidia
have gfx's tech about 5 years ahead of current market level. This allows them
to eek out small increments to customers and stay ahead of the curve. It's a
smart move, and model used by many of the big hardware manufactures (Intel for
example).

However VR has forced their hand to release a significant upgrade. So if VR
turns out to be nothing more than a trend that we forget about for another 20
years, at least it results in some amazing graphics cards.

Just not sure there's any PC focused games developers left to push these
cards...

~~~
Roritharr
I've always heard these "conspiracy" rumors since highschool. They never made
sense to me because of competition... I can't believe that they have the
engineers formerly known as ATI that far in the rear view mirror especially
since the manufacturing processes everyone in Silicon works with are the same.
So where does this "fairly well understood" assumption come from?

~~~
arca_vorago
Heres the deal, now both Intel and AMD are operating on 14nm 16nm, things are
going to rebalance out in both cpu and gpu markets. After much deliberation, I
have decided to wait for Zen for all my future builds, because I have this
strong feeling AMD is about to be back and stronger than ever before.

Basically, Intel was ahead of AMD(ATI), but not anymore...

I welcome more competition in the market either way.

~~~
jdavid
I love AMD and I'm rooting for them, but I'm not sure we are going to have
another Athlon run here.

AMD is still having trouble beating out nVidia, and Intel. The Zen
architecture could in theory have HBM for the system CPU/APU, but I'm guessing
they won't.

Finally A lot of Intel performance comes from compiler optimization and
design, and last time with Athlon it took years for that to roll out. Unless
Zen is years ahead of Intel, I don't know if they will be able to edge that
far ahead. Intel has been doing CPU-GPU pairs now for more than 5 years, and
they are getting better.

I think for AMD to win this round, they would need to have a power ratio that
allowed them to dominate the laptop space, with APUs and eliminate the GPU as
a component, and right now AMD and Intel are both on 14nm, so I think it would
be hard to win there, but we will see.

nVidia is on the 16nm process, so if AMDs chips are equal in performance, they
might draw less power. However, for VR, nVidia has been working very closely
on the software with the various companies and I think they will have a strong
software advantage for a while.

~~~
Alphasite_
For Zen, they don't have to be the best, just good enough. Frankly, for
consumer Intel has been good enough since the 2600 days (except on the mobile
front). So Zen should be fine in that market.

~~~
BuckRogers
Good enough or, "we're #2!" might be all that's needed to chip off some server
shares. Which is good for AMD. But for my machine I'm not sure I'd give up
_any_ single threaded performance for the promise of 8 physical cores with
SandyBridge level IPC.

