[lanek]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

HD 8000 will be largely just and simply revised HD 7000. I don't know why you want so major changes.
Stacked memory may debute with APUs, not videocards.
The lower the videocards market segment, the lower the need of such a major change leading to improved memory bandwidth.

Now you can explain why you need stacked memory on HD 8670.

APU will make a better use of stacked memory ... first they can use them as main memory, when the cpu will still use the system memory.

This will allow a better use of the interconnect and why not finally the real use of virtual memory space.

[UniversalTruth]

AMD Radeon 8000 Series To Support DirectX 11.1

According to Fudzilla, AMD has already told some of its partners that company is aiming to add a DirectX 11.1 support to their newest GPUs. It’s pretty obvious information, while it’s unimaginable that upcoming series of graphics cards would not support the latest DirectX (not yet released though). Anyway, it’s semi-official right now. And we should expect the same from NVIDIA. There were plenty of rumors almost a year ago that actual Kepler GPUs would support it, as it turned out, they don’t.

This, however, is interesting. GPU-Z reports GTX 680 as supporting DX11.1. So, this should be false reading.

Lastly, it’s also said that the architecture of Sea Islands GPUs will receive many changes. Then comparing the same number of cores in GPUs from Northern Islands and Sea Islands will not correspond to the same performance (this would also throw out the rumored Radeon HD 8970 specification that was leaked months ago).

Which one?

"Tenerife" (let's call it in this way) might be a 5100 MTrans at ~410 mm^2 beast with 2560 SPs , 160 TMUs, 32 or 48 ROPs, 384bit GDDR5 and 30-40% faster than Tahiti.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...&postcount=312

[fehu]

DX11.1 it's expected being a minor change mostly on the software side, or not?

[smw]

Someone should tell these guys that Southern Islands arch is out and it already supports DX11.1. The change in the shaders (4D->1D) is also there.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by smw

Someone should tell these guys that Southern Islands arch is out and it already supports DX11.1. The change in the shaders (4D->1D) is also there.

Exactly.

fehu, it's quite small additions, but at least parts of it requires hardware support eg HD5/6 and GTX4/5 (and Fermi-based 6) don't support it.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

Exactly.

fehu, it's quite small additions, but at least parts of it requires hardware support eg HD5/6 and GTX4/5 (and Fermi-based 6) don't support it.

Kepler-based 6 don't support DX11.1 either.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/de...specifications

[Squilliam]

Does 11.1 bring anything interesting over plain jane 11? Also is it true that 11.1 is strictly Windows 8?

[no-X]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

Kepler-based 6 don't support DX11.1 either.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/de...specifications

Nvidia said, that Kepler supports DX11.1 (at launch), but it wasn't written in any official presentation as far as I remember.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by no-X

Nvidia said, that Kepler supports DX11.1 (at launch), but it wasn't written in any official presentation as far as I remember.

Why wasn't it written? They hide something or something stinks. I don't agree that it is normal.

[no-X]

Yes, it isn't very typical. I asked local PR (just a day before launch) if the GTX 680 supports DX11 or 11.1. I was told, that he found one mention of DX11.1 in some internal document, so he believes it supports DX11.1.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by no-X

Yes, it isn't very typical. I asked local PR (just a day before launch) if the GTX 680 supports DX11 or 11.1. I was told, that he found one mention of DX11.1 in some internal document, so he believes it supports DX11.1.

WOW, that supposedly means that even THEY don't know whether their product supports this technology.

So, I'm willing to believe that DX11.1 is supported by AMD only and it is marketing checkbox feature. But because AMD's marketing department was destroyed, now there is lack of any reasonable clarity on this particular question. I mean if DX11.1 is worth it, what's new, when (or if) will it be supported.

Much worse than DX10.1 where at least you had some obvious advantages and NV ruined everything.

[fellix]

Since the last few driver releases:

[sonen]

That means 'working what particular API', as opposed to 'fully complain with'

ManuelG:
The NVIDIA Control Panel lists the API supported by the GPU (DX 11.1) and not feature level (DX 11.0)

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

Also is it true that 11.1 is strictly Windows 8?

AFAIK no.

Originally Posted by no-X

Nvidia said, that Kepler supports DX11.1 (at launch), but it wasn't written in any official presentation as far as I remember.

The exact quote, IIRC, was "yes, it supports DX11.1, but who cares?"

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

AFAIK no.

It means that DX11.1 will be released for Windows 7 (and perhaps Windows Vista too) with Service Pack 2 this autumn. Cool.

Originally Posted by Kaotik

The exact quote, IIRC, was "yes, it supports DX11.1, but who cares?"

This attitude is very very strange. Doesn it mean that all DX11 videocards will support DX11.1 by the means of a simple Windows Update.

[Ethatron]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

Does 11.1 bring anything interesting over plain jane 11?

Preemption; and a lot of removed constrains, so your code gets less (less checks, less management, etc.), the driver handles these cases then as it sees fit, probably in a much better way than a 3rd party from outside the black-box.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

This attitude is very very strange. Doesn it mean that all DX11 videocards will support DX11.1 by the means of a simple Windows Update.

No it doesn't, HD5/6 and GTX4/5/Fermi-6 won't support it, it requires features from the hardware side that just isn't there. Some of the new features could be supported I believe, but not all, and since DX looks for featureset you support, you can't really use those you could support, either.

[no-X]

The question is if DX11 hardware will be able to run DX11.1 applications (like DX10 hardware could run DX10.1 applications). If so, wouldn't it be possible to write a driver, which would report full DX11.1 compatibility, but perform the DX11.1 specific code on DX11 hardware with some additional performance cost? E.g. old Radeon 7000 with late drivers reported to be fully DX7 compatible (including HW TnL), but the driver actually emulated TnL on CPU.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by no-X

The question is if DX11 hardware will be able to run DX11.1 applications (like DX10 hardware could run DX10.1 applications). If so, wouldn't it be possible to write a driver, which would report full DX11.1 compatibility, but perform the DX11.1 specific code on DX11 hardware with some additional performance cost? E.g. old Radeon 7000 with late drivers reported to be fully DX7 compatible (including HW TnL), but the driver actually emulated TnL on CPU.

DX10 hardware can't run DX10.1 applications, if there's no fallback path to just DX10, it won't run on DX10.

Same goes for DX11.1 for sure, if some dev decides to require DX11.1 support, then that's what you need to have. Any sensible dev, ofc, won't do that, though.

(And remember to keep API and Feature Set separate, all cards with modern drivers support DX11 or 11.1, but Feature Set can be anything from DX9 up

[Ryan Smith]

Originally Posted by no-X

Nvidia said, that Kepler supports DX11.1 (at launch), but it wasn't written in any official presentation as far as I remember.

Officially we have been told that Kepler supports D3D 11.1. Whether that works in any current driver build I'm not sure.

As for why NVIDIA is being so cagey about it, I suspect NVIDIA wants to downplay it since only the Kepler members of the 600 series would support it.

[Malo]

Since when have they cared about different members of the same "family" supporting different DX versions?

[keldor314]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

AFAIK no.



The exact quote, IIRC, was "yes, it supports DX11.1, but who cares?"

DX 11.1 has one killer feature, at least for the developer - proper shader debugging support, you know, with breakpoints and all. That's what the new tracing API is all about. The best thing about this is that people with old GPUs get the benefits too - the developer is able to code better shaders in less time with the debugger, and the shaders then work on DX 11 hardware too.

For conventional shaders, a debugger isn't that big a deal, but when you start using compute for anything - AI, physics, texture compression, etc., the shader complexity goes way up, and a debugger is critical to getting the thing to work at all.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

So isn't it about the time of year when we should start getting an inkling of AMDs next-gen cards coming in Autumn/Winter time? Is there anything up, or are they really going to coast through the back to school season on the GHZ editions alone?

Coming from a 6950 with unlocked quads, there's really nothing compelling about the 7xxx range, especially given it's price. Heck, I'm likely to build a new PC before the end of the year, and I'm intending to keep the old graphics card, rather than drop a lot of cash on an incremental upgrade.

Come on AMD, try and tempt me with Sea Islands cards! Don't you want my money?

[lanek]

Dont expect to see any cards before end of the year. (could be early but december look fine).

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

So isn't it about the time of year when we should start getting an inkling of AMDs next-gen cards coming in Autumn/Winter time? Is there anything up, or are they really going to coast through the back to school season on the GHZ editions alone?

Coming from a 6950 with unlocked quads, there's really nothing compelling about the 7xxx range, especially given it's price. Heck, I'm likely to build a new PC before the end of the year, and I'm intending to keep the old graphics card, rather than drop a lot of cash on an incremental upgrade.

Come on AMD, try and tempt me with Sea Islands cards! Don't you want my money?

Given AMD's usual schedule these days, I wouldn't expect anything before December, November at the earliest. But there could be enticing price drops before that. I would argue that the 660 Ti alone warrants some.