[RUMOR] Pascal in trouble with Asynchronous Compute

noko said:
Now for AMD versus Nvidia GPU hardware, I say AMD GCN Arch has been fairing better then Nvidia's including Maxwell (already) . Is that due to luck of the straw or better design choices and some luck with convincing the industry to go more your way? Plus AMD ability to overcome GCN problematic issues (it is more complex) via drivers and programmer experience with it. Now will AMD finally make some money? That is the real question because everything else is mute once you go out of business.
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I guess that depends on your definition of better design.

When you have to convince entire industry to adopt whole new API, force people to program games exactly your wait to unlock hidden shader power, push your clockspeeds to the point where your gpus barely overclock and still end with nearly 300W gpu that in best case scenario outperform competitor reference variant by 20% it's not what I call great design.
 
Indulge me further by showing me a single instance where I "propagandized" anything. Seems like your feathers are getting ruffled from having to defend yourself due to the multitude of nonsensical claims you're making, and have me confused with someone else. I simply gave you a history lesson in that AMD isn't the savior of PC gaming you think it is. I know the truth must hurt for someone who has a deep personal affliction to a brand.
 
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Michaelius said:
I guess that depends on your definition of better design.
When you have to convince entire industry to adopt whole new API, force people to program games exactly your wait to unlock hidden shader power, push your clockspeeds to the point where your gpus barely overclock and still end with nearly 300W gpu that in best case scenario outperform competitor reference variant by 20% it's not what I call great design.
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Actually AMD delivered on what the games industry was asking for. They wanted more control and an APi that can go somewhere where consoles are now the difference is quite large where they get almost all of the power from the GPU rather then the PC which can't use a good percentage of it due to APi limitations...
 
Yes they did, but it would have happened anyways, at least for DX12, at a much later date that what we have seen and probably not to this degree as follows. Also accelerated Vulkan's development as well. But by doing all this it has created a bigger divide on coding paths, not just IHV's coding paths but on a per generation on each IHV's gen's. By doing so it has now created a whole set of new problems (actually old as explained later) that high level API's were trying to avoid. The same problems that we saw with early console development back with the original PS and Sega Genesis. A third problem (without the abstraction layers) is that it created a divide in the PC eco system with Windows, and this gives MS leverage to force people to upgrade to Win 10 and new hardware. I don't think this is a bad thing (because this will limit the amount of work a developer has to do) but it gives more power to Microsoft as Vulkan hasn't and probably won't gain much traction in the game development industry as we can see Valve's steam boxes aren't that much of the rage in PC gaming so far. As time continues this is less of a problem as it will help developers ignore development on systems prior to Windows 10. Why do you think MS wanted to stop supporting Win 7 on new processors? This was a power play, which ultimately they took back, but rest assured they will try something like this again a future date. Now add to this the plans they have for Win 10 store...... yeah there is a very common goal for Microsoft, by exclusively pushing out developers, publishers and in store purchases, giving them a upperhand over steam boxes, other consoles and the entire gaming industry.

In the short term this might give AMD a boost (larger boost if nV doesn't change their strategies), but in the long run the only one to gain from this is MS. As it has always been with the advent of Direct X. Hence why MS went with DX12 instead of using mantle out right. There would have been no way they would have given away that much "power", money, control.
 
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DooKey said:
Is [H] getting paid to shill? What say you?
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That guy is... not understanding what he heard.

nVidia said Paacal be 10x faster than Maxwell in deep learning, not gaming. This accounted for using nVlink with 8xGPUs, half precision vs single precision and the inherent gains of $1B dumped into the Pascal architecture. This was using "CEO math".

Still interesting because 2x gains for 8x GPU rather than 4, 2x gains for half vs single. You still need about 2.5x gains from Maxwell to Pascal itself.

According to his CEO math Pascal should be about 250% faster than Maxwell max die vs max die. We'll see!

Titan to Titan X was 60-70%. This has HBM and double node shrink so it's not out of the realm of possiblity IMO.
 
Well its not a full double node shrink and finfets tend to take up more space that traditional transistors, added to this DP is going to be reintroduced, so I would think its going to end up at around 50-80% faster than current generation at least for gaming performance. They might get a bit more with architectural changes though.
 
razor1 said:
Well its not a full double node shrink and finfets tend to take up more space that traditional transistors, added to this DP is going to be reintroduced, so I would think its going to end up at around 50-80% faster than current generation at least for gaming performance. They might get a bit more with architectural changes though.
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I'd be disappointed if max die Pascal is only 50-80% faster than Maxwell. It's got a lot of multipliers going for it that I could only guess at.
 
If its close to 80% that would be pretty impressive. I don't think we have ever seen gen to gen much faster than that, well outside of the FX to the 6800 ;).

I think what you are saying at 180% is the same as what i'm saying a 80% faster.
 
DooKey said:
Is [H] getting paid to shill? What say you?
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i wouldn't worry too much about him nor trying to wrap your head around the lack of soundness of his comments. A daily diet of paint chips only seems like a good idea to those that eat it.
 
Dayaks said:
I'd be disappointed if max die Pascal is only 50-80% faster than Maxwell. It's got a lot of multipliers going for it that I could only guess at.
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If it's still using GDDR5, then at some point the vram is going to be the bottleneck. No idea how far out that is though.
 
noko said:
Now for AMD versus Nvidia GPU hardware, I say AMD GCN Arch has been fairing better then Nvidia's including Maxwell (already) . Is that due to luck of the straw or better design choices and some luck with convincing the industry to go more your way? Plus AMD ability to overcome GCN problematic issues (it is more complex) via drivers and programmer experience with it. Now will AMD finally make some money? That is the real question because everything else is mute once you go out of business.
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Not likely. People buy items based on marketing solely. Actual card speed only matters to the select few. AMD still needs more mindshare to make a profit. Something like the Apple SuperBowl commercial.
 
trandoanhung1991 said:
Pascal was touted as being 10x faster in a specific scenario, not all scenarios. That was a presentation about training neural networks.
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Don't forget two important things:

1. 8-way array on an NVLink interface (so that 10x is really 5x)
2. "CEO math"

Unfortunately the average Joe Gamer's brain shuts off as soon as he reads "10x faster than Maxwell"
 
Michaelius said:
I guess that depends on your definition of better design.

When you have to convince entire industry to adopt whole new API, force people to program games exactly your wait
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GameNOTworks?
gameworksAnnounce.png


Or Physx?

[Project CARS] is PhysX really running on GPU?! a small benchmark inside • /r/pcgaming

You are talling about AMD pushing new standards that benefit everyone in the market if the architecture is working efficiently?
 
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Michaelius said:
I guess that depends on your definition of better design.

When you have to convince entire industry to adopt whole new API, force people to program games exactly your wait to unlock hidden shader power, push your clockspeeds to the point where your gpus barely overclock and still end with nearly 300W gpu that in best case scenario outperform competitor reference variant by 20% it's not what I call great design.
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How did AMD convince the entire industry to adopt a whole new API? Did they hold a gun to their collective heads? Or did they give them an improved API because everyone else was content simply making money without advancing the state of the art?

As far as power here we see the Fury X using a whole 35W more than the 980 ti, which it is generally keeping up with now in new titles (minus GW before optimizing).
power_average.png
 
Zion Halcyon said:
In football terms, NVidia was content to play a prevent defense, and AMD just scored on a Hail Mary and tied the game.
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In football terms, the Hail Mary is still in the air, the score is 40-12 not 10-3, and there's a large but unknown amount of time left on the clock.

In other news, DX12 performs slower than DX11 in Rise Of The Tomb Raider on both platforms because optimization is hard and DX12 is new.

Edit: quote from Zion Halcyon's post got misattributed to Moorish somehow, now fixed
 
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Would prefer if one company didn't hold a monopoly on performance. It looks like we're headed towards async-related price gouging in 2017.

If Nvidia misses the mark with Pascal, they will be obsolete, no other way to slice it. I don't think they can rely on the 'ignorant masses' to buy their products based on loyalty anymore.
 
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Relayer said:
Or simply because the patched in DX12 is a shit job. ;)
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I thought DX12 was gonna be a silver bullet for AMD? :whistle:

People already are recommending AMD cards over their counterparts based on benchmarks of games not even on sale yet.

Tomb Raider was gonna be one of those pro-AMD games, touted by AMD fans because of DX12. Turns out it's a dud.
 
pl5Xjxdlp


Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.2 is Rift-ready

Interesting use case. If AMD is able to rack up a few wins and attribute them to async they might have a marketing edge this round. Of course this is assuming nVidia doesn't have something up its sleeve.

The Quick Response Queue, on the other hand, gives developers a special asynchronous queue where tasks can get preferential treatment from the GPU while the chip continues to perform other work. AMD says that since GCN asynchronous compute engines are both programmable and manage scheduling in hardware, it can enable the Quick Response Queue with nothing more than a software update on second-generation GCN GPUs and newer.

The company claims that using this feature makes it more likely that the ATW shader will be able to complete before the next vsync interval, even if it's submitted late in the rendering process. That's important since ATW is meant to reduce immersion-breaking judder in one's VR experience, and a warped frame is better than a dropped one.
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trandoanhung1991 said:
I thought DX12 was gonna be a silver bullet for AMD? :whistle:
People already are recommending AMD cards over their counterparts based on benchmarks of games not even on sale yet.
Tomb Raider was gonna be one of those pro-AMD games, touted by AMD fans because of DX12. Turns out it's a dud.
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I would say that DX12 is the platform for AMD and that still is true sadly you can't force people (developers) who are obliged to release certain features within a certain time frame to perform miracles , ALL the DX12 stuff that AMD would benefit from should be in a later stage rather then the early adopters with some exceptions (people using the Mantle engine code which they ported to DX12).

Tomb Raider is a Nvidia sponsored game. Maybe that is why the DX12 was so "rushed" out of the door and considered a check mark feature ..
 
trandoanhung1991 said:
I thought DX12 was gonna be a silver bullet for AMD? :whistle:

People already are recommending AMD cards over their counterparts based on benchmarks of games not even on sale yet.

Tomb Raider was gonna be one of those pro-AMD games, touted by AMD fans because of DX12. Turns out it's a dud.
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Tomb Raider DX12 support was patched in:

One thing we are very excited about to help us further realize those goals is the new DirectX 12 graphics API that is available on Windows 10. In the patch released today on Steam – and coming soon to the Windows 10 Store – we will be adding DirectX 12 support to Rise of the Tomb Raider.
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I'm pretty sure that games written from the ground up with full DX12 support will fare better than those with DX12 enhancements tacked on afterwards.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Not really Nvidia been paying people left and right to cripple games ....
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Yeah now when you put it that way.......

“Another big feature, which we are also using on Xbox One, is asynchronous compute. This allows us to re-use GPU power that would otherwise go to waste, and do multiple tasks in parallel,” Katsman wrote. “And there is a never before seen level of control over Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX configurations, which means that as a developer we can take full control over those systems and ensure users get a great experience with them."

That is the developer talking

http://www.pcgamer.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider-gets-directx-12-support-in-latest-patch/
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
Would prefer if one company didn't hold a monopoly on performance. It looks like we're headed towards async-related price gouging in 2017.

If Nvidia misses the mark with Pascal, they will be obsolete, no other way to slice it. I don't think they can rely on the 'ignorant masses' to buy their products based on loyalty anymore.
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I'm sure people said the same when nVidia launched the FX series and Fermi.
 
n=1 said:
I'm sure people said the same when nVidia launched the FX series and Fermi.
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Obsolete for a generation won't doom an entire company. And Fermi was faster than AMD's competition.
We might be seeing a new FX series all over again. Great comparison.
 
Async isn't akin to what happened with the FX, the FX series the entire shader pipeline was a let down. Async helps in addition when the shader pipeline isn't being used to the fullest extent.
 
n=1 said:
I'm sure people said the same when nVidia launched the FX series and Fermi.
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Yeah, they'll be fine. The beginning of the graph below is in the middle of the FX series generation. The lowest point on the graph for NVIDIA in Q3 2004 was when the X800 was released. NVIDIA's marketshare actually increased significantly after Fermi launched in Q2 2010.
discrete.jpg
 
Honestly, I hope async compute does absolutely nothing for anybody after watching 10 threads a week of fanboys masturbating over it for the past however many months.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
Obsolete for a generation won't doom an entire company. And Fermi was faster than AMD's competition.
We might be seeing a new FX series all over again. Great comparison.
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Oh ok "they" was referring to Pascal.

Still not convinced they'll be "obsolete" if they somehow missed the mark, since the market/name/mindshare of nVidia is just too great right now. It would take several generations of FX level failure before people would start thinking twice.

razor1 said:
Async isn't akin to what happened with the FX, the FX series the entire shader pipeline was a let down. Async helps in addition when the shader pipeline isn't being used to the fullest extent.
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Performance was one thing, that dustbuster fan was something else entirely. :eek:
 
evilsofa said:
In football terms, the Hail Mary is still in the air, the score is 40-12 not 10-3, and there's a large but unknown amount of time left on the clock.

In other news, DX12 performs slower than DX11 in Rise Of The Tomb Raider on both platforms because optimization is hard and DX12 is new.
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Whoever did that test is looking at entirely the wrong thing.
Minimum framerates have gone up significantly in DX12.
Benchmarks run on a 6600K with a 390X:
So is DX11 is better than DX12 based on that benchmark?
Look at the minimum framerates. In DX11 it drops to 9.32 FPS, while in DX12 the lowest is 30.76 FPS!
That is far more important for a fluid gameplay experience than an average drop of ~7 FPS.
It could still be better optimized, because there shouldn't really have been a performance drop at all, but it's still a huge improvement.

Async Compute is a big deal looking forward, and NVIDIA is going to have problems if Pascal does not support it.
That said, I won't be switching to AMD until they sort out their DX11 performance.
Without driver command list support, their DX11 driver is single-threaded and performance is considerably worse than NVIDIA as a result.

So for me it really depends who gets there first: AMD with properly multi-threaded and well-optimized DX11 drivers, or NVIDIA with Async Compute.
Unfortunately I suspect that means I'll be holding onto my 960 for another generation instead of upgrading this year.
 
zone74 said:
Whoever did that test is looking at entirely the wrong thing.
Minimum framerates have gone up significantly in DX12.
Benchmarks run on a 6600K with a 390X:
So is DX11 is better than DX12 based on that benchmark?
Look at the minimum framerates. In DX11 it drops to 9.32 FPS, while in DX12 the lowest is 30.76 FPS!
That is far more important for a fluid gameplay experience than an average drop of ~7 FPS.
It could still be better optimized, because there shouldn't really have been a performance drop at all, but it's still a huge improvement.

Async Compute is a big deal looking forward, and NVIDIA is going to have problems if Pascal does not support it.
That said, I won't be switching to AMD until they sort out their DX11 performance.
Without driver command list support, their DX11 driver is single-threaded and performance is considerably worse than NVIDIA as a result.

So for me it really depends who gets there first: AMD with properly multi-threaded and well-optimized DX11 drivers, or NVIDIA with Async Compute.
Unfortunately I suspect that means I'll be holding onto my 960 for another generation instead of upgrading this year.
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I am just curious if Async really cause the increase minimum framerate, and whether we see similar trends if we run Nvidia 970. At the moment, I just feel like the whole Async is overblown out of proportion, not saying there isn't any benefit, just thinking not many developers will go out of their way to fine tune their game using Async when there are so many chipsets.
 
Higher minimums using DX12 is consistent with results using Mantle, not necessarily higher maximum FPS. Basically the more compute heavy effects there are, the larger the difference the Async scheduler can make, especially if the new RQR function is used, as is the possibility of reducing lag. All this in addition to the gains seen on batches in general with DX12.
 
Yakk said:
Higher minimums using DX12 is consistent with results using Mantle, not necessarily higher maximum FPS. Basically the more compute heavy effects there are, the larger the difference the Async scheduler can make, especially if the new RQR function is used, as is the possibility of reducing lag. All this in addition to the gains seen on batches in general with DX12.
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THIS!!! I have been saying that fps metric may become obsolete with DX12. Minimums and possibly visual fidelity may be the new criteria, especially when comparing DX11 and DX12. Mantle showed huge gains in frame consistency especially with multi GPUs.
 
And was that to compute functionality or that because of the ability to use more cores? I would think it is the later, Compute shader usage doesn't have much to do with frame rate spikes unless written badly, or not properly used.

I'm not sure what RQR is... Typo?

And there would be a theoretical maximum that you can get out of efficiency not to mention, a hard line maximum the scheduler can offer... So no it just doesn't keep going more.
 
razor1 said:
And was that to compute functionality or that because of the ability to use more cores? I would think it is the later, Compute shader usage doesn't have much to do with frame rate spikes unless written badly, or not properly used.

I'm not sure what RQR is... Typo?
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Must have meant QRQ (Quick Response Queue)
 
zone74 said:
Whoever did that test is looking at entirely the wrong thing.
Minimum framerates have gone up significantly in DX12.
Benchmarks run on a 6600K with a 390X:
So is DX11 is better than DX12 based on that benchmark?
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They can't look at the minimum frame rates, there's no current utility to RECORD them during regular gameplay in DX12.

But you'll notice that even though the internal benchmark reports LOWER frame rates, the playable settings remain exactly the same on everything except the GTX 970!

This means that minimum frame rates are obviously going up. Sounds like a valid test to me!
 
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