AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[juanrga]

Ok, hold on a second with Ubisoft's discussion. I'll play devil's advocate for a minute here.

I won't delve into how it was coded (cause I don't know/care), but will take the "facts" laid here in the thread about AC:U as truth.

Why are we blaming Ubisoft for "using more than 15K calls" using DirectX? Isn't that what "next gen" is all about? Game devs (and publishers) put games that make our current gen hardware crawl. So, on one hand we see Ubisoft putting AC:U out (dumb bugs aside), pushing the performance of PCs out there to the limit and we're complaining about it? Isn't that what we call a "double standard"? The game looks better in consoles and in PCs as well, isn't it? Is it a noticeable difference? From what I've read, yes.

Ok, that's it. I still hate Ubicrap, so we're clear, haha.

Now, on the other side, why blame AMD when nVidia is also having issues with it? Since the consoles use AMD hardware, but the PC version of AC:U is a Gameworks/TWIMTBP sponsored title, it's not really unexpected a difference in performance for day 1. I'm not calling dumb conspiracy theories, but plain old business tactics at work here. AMD needs to put forward a driver update to catch up and that's about it.

Now, for the dumb conspiracy theory: Code it like crap for PC, golden for Console (well, less crappy in Ubisoft's case, haha) and people will turn into consoles again since a PC upgrade is way more than a Console's sticker price.

Cheers!

Ubisoft makes a game that requires about 3x more draw calls than DX11 can handle. What happens after that is a severe bottleneck with most draw calls culled or incorrectly rendered, resulting in texture/NPCs pooping all over the place. Then they ignore that Mantle could solve (or at least alleviate) their draw call problems and launch a public campaign against AMD hardware, ignoring that the same problems happen on Nvidia hardware as well:

Strangely, a community manager on Ubisoft's forums has singled out AMD CPU and GPU configurations as causing graphics performance issues, even as users of Nvidia graphics cards have experienced plenty of their own problems. PCWorld's Hayden Dingman (who is currently working on his Assassin's Creed: Unity review) is using an Nvidia GTX 760 GPU, and has seen his computer go into a hard lock 10 times over the last two days, among other issues. The entire launch is a mess on PCs and consoles alike, and likely won't be fixed for some time, so calling out AMD in particular doesn't make much sense.

Thus Ubisoft is using a "double standard". Don't you agree?

Ubisoft is and will always be CRAP, they have zero respect for PC and have gone as far to let us all know what they think of PC.

ExtremeTech are up to something, you all may want to read this article which denotes his problem on his Intel/nVidia System:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/194123-assassins-creed-unity-for-the-pc-benchmarks-and-analysis-of-its-poor-performance

People with a Core i7-4930K, 16 GB ram and 2x GTX 980s in SLI is having issues as well.

 

[-Fran-]

Thus Ubisoft is using a "double standard". Don't you agree?

No, they actually don't like this console Gen and they don't like working with AMD (hence Gameworks intead of Gaming Evolved / MANTLE). So, no, they're actually acting very consequently.

Cheers!

 

[blackkstar]

DX11 supports up to ~15k draw calls before the CPU requirements get out of hand. In the same scenario Mantle could do around 130k calls on the same CPU. So Ubisoft is exceeding the amount of draw calls by 3.3x. This is not AMD fault.

No, its not. What is AMD's fault is a performance difference in DX between them and NVIDIA, if one exists. The point here isn't the amount of pointless draw calls, the point here is "does AMD suffer worse then NVIDIA, and if so, why".

It's a game that has Nvidia's hands all over it. If you want to see "Nvidia optimization", look at what they did with Crysis 2 tessellation. Nvidia will hurt their own consumers if it means hurting consumers of their competition more, and AC:U is proof of it.

I realize as a game developer, you like Nvidia because they have really nice tools to help with game development and they all work very well with industry standard tools like stuff from Autodesk, but they rarely have the consumer's best interests in mind.

Ubisoft deserves the blame for this entirely. If they wanted something with 50k draw calls, they should have been talking with AMD about Mantle and how to deal with getting it to run better on consoles. Instead, they went with Nvidia and Gameworks so they could have HBAO+ and FXAA. So instead of having a game that runs decent on consoles and some gaming PCs, you now have a game that runs like trash on all consoles and all PCs, but if you're an Nvidia PC user you get some extra fake shadows with HBAO+ and the pixel shader equivalent of turning down sharpness on your monitor.

Here's how I view the timeline of AC:U events

1. AMD solves the problem of being draw call bottlenecked by creating Mantle
2. Ubisoft teams up with Nvidia to create a new game
3. The game ends up making 5 times the amount of recommended draw calls than what DX11 calls for
4. Ubisoft blames AMD for the fact that hardware can't handle 50k DX11 draw calls

It's a bit like if I'm drowning, you offer me scuba gear, I tell you to piss off, and then after I barely make it to shore I blame you entirely for almost drowning.

 

[jdwii]

Seems like videos are popping up on youtube with far cry 4 gameplay stuttering is a thing like watch dogs however FPS is high even on lower-end hardware. This one person has a 8350fx and a high-end GPU and the GPU is only seeing 70% usage while the FPS is at 35. Hoping a driver update can solve these issues. How many of you are going to play this game i'm wondering?

 

[esrever]

The PC port is done by the same people who did AC:U so it being a bad port isn't that hard to imagine. Ubisoft just doesn't care about PC.

 

[Reepca]

I don't always go on crusades against people for using certain brands, but when I do, I make it clear in my name that I'm a sponsored troll.

 

[8350rocks]

This thread is free of paid shills...I suggest you go elsewhere. NVidia has no place in a discussion in a CPU forum, especially a thread about upcoming architecture.

 

[szatkus]

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-titan-x-gpu-amd-fiji-xt-gpu-benchmarks/

WCCF at its best

 

[jdwii]

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-titan-x-gpu-amd-fiji-xt-gpu-benchmarks/

WCCF at its best

Wowza lets all hope that's true, in other words i just found out we don't need Nvidia sheild to play are games if we have an nvidia card its called Limelight game streaming(oh and it works on laptops to). Amd needs something like this

 

[szatkus]

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-titan-x-gpu-amd-fiji-xt-gpu-benchmarks/

WCCF at its best

Wowza lets all hope that's true, in other words i just found out we don't need Nvidia sheild to play are games if we have an nvidia card its called Limelight game streaming(oh and it works on laptops to). Amd needs something like this

Like Cat-powered tablet with streaming (some open standard)?

 

[jdwii]

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-titan-x-gpu-amd-fiji-xt-gpu-benchmarks/

WCCF at its best

Wowza lets all hope that's true, in other words i just found out we don't need Nvidia sheild to play are games if we have an nvidia card its called Limelight game streaming(oh and it works on laptops to). Amd needs something like this

Like Cat-powered tablet with streaming (some open standard)?

Not sure what you mean? Eitherway if you guys have android and a Nvidia video card give it an option i mean it seems amazing i should know soon

 

[Embra]

AMD Awarded $32 Million for 'Extreme Scale' High-Performance Computing Research
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-awarded-32-million-for-extreme-scale-high-performance-computing-research.html

 

[de5_Roy]

Windows 7 will support DirectX 12
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36329-windows-7-will-support-directx-12
AMD said it “misspoke”

AMD to launch faster Hawaii iteration
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36326-amd-to-launch-faster-hawaii-iteration

edit:
AMD's HSA Run-Time Library Is Now Open-Source
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzODY
AMD's "AMDKFD" HSA Driver Is Ready For Pulling In Linux 3.19
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg0MDE

 

[blackkstar]

Windows 7 will support DirectX 12
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36329-windows-7-will-support-directx-12
AMD said it “misspoke”

AMD to launch faster Hawaii iteration
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36326-amd-to-launch-faster-hawaii-iteration

edit:
AMD's HSA Run-Time Library Is Now Open-Source
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzODY
AMD's "AMDKFD" HSA Driver Is Ready For Pulling In Linux 3.19
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg0MDE

The headline about DX12 on Windows 7 seems misleading. The article just says Huddy misspoke and doesn't say anything about it actually coming to Windows 7.

I'm pretty sceptical. MS forced me to run Vista on my i7 920 system because XP wouldn't support hyperthreading properly and it'd do things like schedule two heavy threads on the same core (one physical one logical) and kill performance, while the other 6 threads sat around idle.

Anyways we are too focused on GPUs. Seronx is claiming that we will get a new HEDT platform in H2 of 2015 from AMD with 2p 8m/16c Excavator for high end and Zen later. Has anyone else heard of this or is seronx just gonna seronx?

It makes a lot of sense to me as an 8m/16c 2p system would steal the performance halo from Intel by a huge margin and that'd help AMD market itself as a premium product instead of the value brand (which is an image it desperately needs to get rid of). People love that halo marketing and they'll gladly tell someone to buy a Core i3 or Pentium G because Intel Haswell-E Extreme Edition is faster than FX 9590.

Viewgamer at S|A is also claiming next gen AMD GPU will be 20nm. Sounds like maybe we get a little Hawaii refresh to buy some time in the holidays before we see a January to March 20nm AMD GPU launch. Maybe slap a nice cooler on it, raise clocks, and do some aggressive binning? It won't win on efficiency but maybe AMD can finally start to sell products around added value of software instead of just good value hardware.

Nvidia has always been really good at "yes this AMD GPU is faster and costs less but what about physX and shadowplay and FXAA?!?!?! Also muh drivers!" and it'd be nice to see AMD at least fight back on this front a little bit. They do have Mantle at least.

 

[gamerk316]

I'm pretty sceptical. MS forced me to run Vista on my i7 920 system because XP wouldn't support hyperthreading properly and it'd do things like schedule two heavy threads on the same core (one physical one logical) and kill performance, while the other 6 threads sat around idle.

To be fair, Vista onward was a fairly significant upgrade to the base NT Kernel (NT 6) compared to XP. Vista/7/8 don't have a ton of major architectural changes under the hood that would preclude supporting DX12. Also remember MSFT wants as wide adoption as possible, given OGLNG and Mantle.

 

[szatkus]

Windows 7 will support DirectX 12
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36329-windows-7-will-support-directx-12
AMD said it “misspoke”

AMD to launch faster Hawaii iteration
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36326-amd-to-launch-faster-hawaii-iteration

edit:
AMD's HSA Run-Time Library Is Now Open-Source
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzODY
AMD's "AMDKFD" HSA Driver Is Ready For Pulling In Linux 3.19
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg0MDE

The headline about DX12 on Windows 7 seems misleading. The article just says Huddy misspoke and doesn't say anything about it actually coming to Windows 7.

Yep, Huddy worked in MS on DX and probably saw their roadmaps. I doubt that they've changed them recently. They just scolded him for "commenting on unreleased product" or something.

Anyways we are too focused on GPUs. Seronx is claiming that we will get a new HEDT platform in H2 of 2015 from AMD with 2p 8m/16c Excavator for high end and Zen later. Has anyone else heard of this or is seronx just gonna seronx?

It makes a lot of sense to me as an 8m/16c 2p system would steal the performance halo from Intel by a huge margin and that'd help AMD market itself as a premium product instead of the value brand (which is an image it desperately needs to get rid of). People love that halo marketing and they'll gladly tell someone to buy a Core i3 or Pentium G because Intel Haswell-E Extreme Edition is faster than FX 9590.

Just Seronx.

Viewgamer at S|A is also claiming next gen AMD GPU will be 20nm. Sounds like maybe we get a little Hawaii refresh to buy some time in the holidays before we see a January to March 20nm AMD GPU launch. Maybe slap a nice cooler on it, raise clocks, and do some aggressive binning? It won't win on efficiency but maybe AMD can finally start to sell products around added value of software instead of just good value hardware.

Nvidia has always been really good at "yes this AMD GPU is faster and costs less but what about physX and shadowplay and FXAA?!?!?! Also muh drivers!" and it'd be nice to see AMD at least fight back on this front a little bit. They do have Mantle at least.

Everyone talks about 20nm. Hawaii in 20nm woudln't be called Hawaii, because it's another design. Also too small value compared to Pirate Islands and Maxwell to release them.

 

[etayorius]

We were taking about Ubi a while back?

Ubi blaming AMD?

This explains UBISOFT:

http://asidcast.com/index.php/2014/11/ex-ubisoft-employee-talks-experience/

 

[gamerk316]

^^ You think that applies only to Ubisoft?

 

[gamerk316]

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/194430-intel-will-combine-pc-and-mobile-divisions-a-bold-move-that-might-spell-the-end-for-atom

 

[-Fran-]

^^ You think that applies only to Ubisoft?

It looks kind of fake-ish. I'd like a double confirmation of that "generic and totally not fake ex-Ubisoft employee" 's existence.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/194430-intel-will-combine-pc-and-mobile-divisions-a-bold-move-that-might-spell-the-end-for-atom

That Article, although good, forgets about big server CPUs. The current "desktop" line of Core CPUs is basically what Atom is trying to fill, but with a higher power envelope. It makes sense to unify the 2 areas at first glance, but the devil is in the details as usual. The low power market is a totally different beast than desktop (this includes lappies, I'd say), so it makes sense from the technical point of view, but from the commercial point of view, I have my doubts.

Cheers!

 

[blackkstar]

Windows 7 will support DirectX 12
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36329-windows-7-will-support-directx-12
AMD said it “misspoke”

AMD to launch faster Hawaii iteration
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/36326-amd-to-launch-faster-hawaii-iteration

edit:
AMD's HSA Run-Time Library Is Now Open-Source
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzODY
AMD's "AMDKFD" HSA Driver Is Ready For Pulling In Linux 3.19
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg0MDE

The headline about DX12 on Windows 7 seems misleading. The article just says Huddy misspoke and doesn't say anything about it actually coming to Windows 7.

Yep, Huddy worked in MS on DX and probably saw their roadmaps. I doubt that they've changed them recently. They just scolded him for "commenting on unreleased product" or something.

Anyways we are too focused on GPUs. Seronx is claiming that we will get a new HEDT platform in H2 of 2015 from AMD with 2p 8m/16c Excavator for high end and Zen later. Has anyone else heard of this or is seronx just gonna seronx?

It makes a lot of sense to me as an 8m/16c 2p system would steal the performance halo from Intel by a huge margin and that'd help AMD market itself as a premium product instead of the value brand (which is an image it desperately needs to get rid of). People love that halo marketing and they'll gladly tell someone to buy a Core i3 or Pentium G because Intel Haswell-E Extreme Edition is faster than FX 9590.

Just Seronx.

Viewgamer at S|A is also claiming next gen AMD GPU will be 20nm. Sounds like maybe we get a little Hawaii refresh to buy some time in the holidays before we see a January to March 20nm AMD GPU launch. Maybe slap a nice cooler on it, raise clocks, and do some aggressive binning? It won't win on efficiency but maybe AMD can finally start to sell products around added value of software instead of just good value hardware.

Nvidia has always been really good at "yes this AMD GPU is faster and costs less but what about physX and shadowplay and FXAA?!?!?! Also muh drivers!" and it'd be nice to see AMD at least fight back on this front a little bit. They do have Mantle at least.

Everyone talks about 20nm. Hawaii in 20nm woudln't be called Hawaii, because it's another design. Also too small value compared to Pirate Islands and Maxwell to release them.

I think perhaps you misunderstood. I was saying we'd get a Hawaii refresh to hold us over until 20nm chips came out. Looking at GTX 970 and 980 release, it looks like Nvidia is set to stick with that for a while, with maybe a new Titan class chip for a ton of money.

I'd sort of imagine a Hawaii refresh to stop the bleeding against 970 and 980 and then a 20nm new chip that's not Hawaii to compete against a new Titan in the spring (Fiji).

AMD has an opportunity with a 2p platform like that, specially regarding the news that Intel is merging mobile and desktop and there's rumors swirling of basically them abandoning big cores and making some middle of the road Atom/Core chip.

If that did happen, Intel would basically hand over HEDT, professional workstations, and big number crunchers to AMD and HSA.

Plus, I find it a bit entertaining to go from "AMD is going to abandon all big cores and Intel will destroy them" to "Intel is going to abandon big cores while AMD releases a 16m/32c 2p platform"

I am attracted to what seronx is saying because I hit this earlier. If AMD is building unified memory architectures between CPU and GPU, why not make unified memory between many CPUs and many GPUs? AMD will have a strategic position where they can release a platform with many CPUs and many GPUs, and they are all HSA accelerated and all you have to do is recompile the software (as long as it's using OpenMP) and then you've got a computing monster on your hands. A 2p, 8m/16c CPU rig with HSA and two Fiji GPUs would be serious competition to things like Xeon Phi and CUDA. And with what AMD is doing with OpenMP, it'd completely bypass the issue of being forced to use the wrong device for the wrong job or to incur stiff performance penalties for transferring the entire workload in memory over a "slow" bus like PCIe 3.0 x16.

HSA JPEG decoding and HSA Open Office sorting is cool, but sorting numbers and loading thumbnails faster on a laptop seems like a bit of wasted potential with HSA, no?

 

[etayorius]

^^ You think that applies only to Ubisoft?

I know Bethesda, Deep Silver, CD Projekt and Rockstar are not like them... EA used to be horrible in all possible ways, they gotten better, Activision is somewhere in the Middle, but Definitely Ubisoft should be named Worst Gaming Company of the year.

 

[szatkus]

I think perhaps you misunderstood. I was saying we'd get a Hawaii refresh to hold us over until 20nm chips came out. Looking at GTX 970 and 980 release, it looks like Nvidia is set to stick with that for a while, with maybe a new Titan class chip for a ton of money.

I'd sort of imagine a Hawaii refresh to stop the bleeding against 970 and 980 and then a 20nm new chip that's not Hawaii to compete against a new Titan in the spring (Fiji).

Yes, that makes sense.

BTW, you still believe in 20nm Fiji?

AMD has an opportunity with a 2p platform like that, specially regarding the news that Intel is merging mobile and desktop and there's rumors swirling of basically them abandoning big cores and making some middle of the road Atom/Core chip.

If that did happen, Intel would basically hand over HEDT, professional workstations, and big number crunchers to AMD and HSA.

Plus, I find it a bit entertaining to go from "AMD is going to abandon all big cores and Intel will destroy them" to "Intel is going to abandon big cores while AMD releases a 16m/32c 2p platform"

I am attracted to what seronx is saying because I hit this earlier. If AMD is building unified memory architectures between CPU and GPU, why not make unified memory between many CPUs and many GPUs? AMD will have a strategic position where they can release a platform with many CPUs and many GPUs, and they are all HSA accelerated and all you have to do is recompile the software (as long as it's using OpenMP) and then you've got a computing monster on your hands. A 2p, 8m/16c CPU rig with HSA and two Fiji GPUs would be serious competition to things like Xeon Phi and CUDA. And with what AMD is doing with OpenMP, it'd completely bypass the issue of being forced to use the wrong device for the wrong job or to incur stiff performance penalties for transferring the entire workload in memory over a "slow" bus like PCIe 3.0 x16.

HSA JPEG decoding and HSA Open Office sorting is cool, but sorting numbers and loading thumbnails faster on a laptop seems like a bit of wasted potential with HSA, no?

There are always a lot of crazy rumors after news like that.
Intel get most of their revenue from "HEDT, professional workstations, and big number crunchers". Abandoning it for gadget lovers doesn't sound like a good idea, especially if dozen of ARM cores compete on that market.

 

[8350rocks]

We were taking about Ubi a while back?

Ubi blaming AMD?

This explains UBISOFT:

http://asidcast.com/index.php/2014/11/ex-ubisoft-employee-talks-experience/

LOL...if you think working for a software developer, regardless of what kind of development it is, is going to be some cush job drinking coffee all day, doing a few productivity meetings, and leaving at 5 pm, newsflash...that ship has sailed. The bigger the company, the more they dump into a AAA title. The more they dump into a AAA title, the harder they push to make more profits faster.

Seriously...once in a great while people get a peek into what it is all really about. Now, the sentiments expressed by "supposedly" ubisoft are a bit extreme...or are painted as such by an unconfirmed source. Though, that is what it is...it is on reddit. I try to take most things over there with a grain of salt...some of them are level headed, and some of them are just flat out trolls...

 

[szatkus]

AMD will disclose Carrizo, an integrated processor with its latest x86 core. The 28 nm chip measures 244.62 mm2 and packs more than 3.1 billion transistors. Its new Excavator core is 23% smaller and uses 40% less power than AMD’s previous x86 core.

Can we start FD-SOI rumors again?