AMD: Pirate Islands (R* 3** series) Speculation/Rumor Thread

Finally, some really detailed and explanatory roadmaps!

Oh wait no. They're 100% useless. Here we go anyways:

4roGCaY.jpg

lW57BQe.jpg




"AMD roadmaps are subject to change bla bla bla"
LOL what are they going to do? Trick us all and put the R7 300 GPUs into the "Performance" and "Enthusiast" range?
 
Anyway, this was the slide for the financial analyst day, what do you expect, that they tell you the core speed, number of shader ? ( well pretty sure the informations we had on this side as well accurate anyway ).. Without saying, this dont mean anything without Lisa su words on it, tthey was just there for show behind her on the wall.

This said, i really like the graphism, looking on them, it seems they have finally hire a real graphist team..
 
AMD posted a thing or two on its blog about the DX12 API. The blog entry also lists a handy overview of what cards are actually DX12 compatible.

Now very little is new to the list, other then the fact that AMD is confirming DX12 compatibility with products based on the GPU/IGPs below. Presuming you’ve installed Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10041 (or later) and obtained the latest driver from Windows Update, here’s the list of DirectX 12-ready AMD components.


  • AMD Radeon R9 Series graphics
  • AMD Radeon R7 Series graphics
  • AMD Radeon R5 240 graphics
  • AMD Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics for OEM systems (HD 8570 and up)
  • AMD Radeon HD 8000M Series graphics for notebooks
  • AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics (HD 7730 and up)
  • AMD Radeon HD 7000M Series graphics for notebooks (HD 7730M and up)
  • AMD A4/A6/A8/A10-7000 Series APUs (codenamed “Kaveri”)
  • AMD A6/A8/A10 PRO-7000 Series APUs (codenamed “Kaveri”)
  • AMD E1/A4/A10 Micro-6000 Series APUs (codenamed “Mullins”)
  • AMD E1/E2/A4/A6/A8-6000 Series APUs (codenamed “Beema”)
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-released-list-of-compatible-directx-12-cards.html
 
Everything with GCN. They had already stated that, right?
 
The move to GCN 1.2 brought a very nice bump for Tonga, and while the move from 1.1 to 1.2 probably wouldn't be as much, just including the new ISA and a 10% boost in performance would put Hawaii in line with 980/970 cards at a similar price.
Based on what Tonga showed so far, even GCN 1.2 cannot compete with Maxwell 2. Without major change they are heading for disaster one way or another, hope this is pre-launch disinfo.
 
Based on what Tonga showed so far, even GCN 1.2 cannot compete with Maxwell 2. Without major change they are heading for disaster one way or another, hope this is pre-launch disinfo.

Personally, i cant use Tonga as a reference for show the difference in performance between 1.1-1.2 ... on features level ok, on performance side. It was a smal chip, designed to be at this level, it have less sp than a 7970/280x, it have less memory than both 7970-7950, a smaller memory bus, slower core speed, but perform more or less at the level of the 7950-7970 ( in between. ) But its a bit hard with a chip like that to really draw a line.
 
Last edited:
Based on what Tonga showed so far, even GCN 1.2 cannot compete with Maxwell 2. Without major change they are heading for disaster one way or another, hope this is pre-launch disinfo.
Hawaii performs really close to GM204 in almost all recent games that aren't made using Gameworks. The higher-clocked rebadges with 8GB of faster memory will probably shorten the gap even further.
How is that a disaster?


It was a smal chip, designed to be at this level, it have less sp than a 7970/280x,
Tonga is larger and has more transistors than Tahiti. It isn't a small chip by any means.
 
Personally, i cant use Tonga as a reference for show the difference in performance between 1.1-1.2
That is why I also did not do it. But when I try, it does not look that good either. The only improvement related to gaming performance is increased bandwidth efficiency, and Hawaii does not need that. Unless they reduce the bus width, but with so many changes it would not be refered to as Hawaii anymore.

Tonga's never been reviewed as a full chip, and we're not even certain about just what is disabled in the R9 285.
At this point I don't believe in any surprises, stronger front end and color compression alone, maybe bigger L2, could account for the increased transistor count. If there is nothing more to unlock than the shaders, it will not help against much much smaller GM206.
 
That is why I also did not do it. But when I try, it does not look that good either. The only improvement related to gaming performance is increased bandwidth efficiency, and Hawaii does not need that. Unless they reduce the bus width, but with so many changes it would not be refered to as Hawaii anymore.


At this point I don't believe in any surprises, stronger front end and color compression alone, maybe bigger L2, could account for the increased transistor count. If there is nothing more to unlock than the shaders, it will not help against much much smaller GM206.
[/QUOTE]

Tonga does tessellation rather well, would help in the gameworks titles with tessellation apparently being used on sun shafts and hair and fur, and surely dialled to 11 for the relative advantage of nvidia cards.

tessmark1.jpg


The bottom line is AMD’s tessellation performance is not very good and there is not a lot NVIDIA can/should do about it. Using DX11 tessellation has sound technical reasoning behind it, it helps to keep the GPU memory footprint small so multiple characters can use hair and fur at the same time.

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-...unt?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

We definitely wanted to include the AMD Radeon R9 285 in this evaluation for a specific reason. Refer back to our Far Cry 4 Performance Review and you will find that we said Enhanced Godrays was playable on this video card, where it wasn't on competing video cards. In fact, it seemed more playable on the R9 285 than it did on the R9 290 and R9 290X!

The color compression might also work out considering how 285 can demonstrate way better pixel fillrate in 3d mark vantage test.
 
Unless there's a new GCN 1.2+ 20nm chip we know nothing about, it doesn't look like Captain Jack exists at all. It could be Fiji, but those power consumption levels don't seem feasible.
Regardless, if the R9 285 was rebadged into the R9 380, there's no way the 380X would have 2x better performance.

It could be the cut down Fiji, 290 seems to average around 210W of power, so sounds about right for a 390. I was going off on the high wattage rumors for 390X due to its supposedly default water cooling, so 200W seemed 380X territory. Anyway, fiji samples are going around for ~$1200 right now, so hope springs eternal.

78Vu1VA.jpg
 
Back
Top