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

Not upset, just bemused. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.

 

Why are you comparing apples to oranges ?

Nvidia released a card with 4gigs and it was later found out that a portion of that memory was crippled.

Its a far cry from AMD releasing a 4gig card in which all 4 gigs perform as it should.

 

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-fury-x-specs-fiji/


Specs ?

Depending on price and if these are real the Fiji pro could be a nice card . The fury x water cooled looks nice too.

 

I would put a lot more stock in AMD's claims they will fix their paltry 4GB issues with driver massaging if they could fucking put out a non-beta driver more than once or twice a year! I thought it was ridiculous last year when there was no proper WHQL release until may, but here we're creeping up on mid-june and last non-beta driver was six months ago!

I'm to pay maybe upwards of a thousand bucks for a card with virtually no proper driver support, what the shit is AMD thinking?!

Also, issue number two I have with this - if 4GB is really enough even for a bleeding-edge card, then why on earth is the 390X equipped with 8 gigs? Just for shits and giggles, what?? I think AMD is full of crap, TBH and they know it, so they just make some half-wild claims about how they'll take care of things with their drivers which they will never really be able to back up in reality since they have virtually no development resources anymore, and hope we'll just forget about it.

Look at how friggin long it took them to fix their microstuttering problem in crossfire - if they ever actually completely fixed it that is. YEARS, literally, since people first started talking about it. First they just ignored it, then it was like, "yeah, we're aware of it and we're on it", and not a god-fucking-damned thing happened, for years and years. And then there was the big microstutter-abolishing catalyst drums-and-trumpets-fanfare release, and it turned out it was just game-specific fixes for some popular titles, and not a general case fix for every situation. I don't even know if they ever moved past the game-specific implementation, because I'm running just one board these days.

 

WHQL certification costs resources. Releasing WHQL drivers more often means worse drivers overall, as resources have to be diverted from fixing bugs/improving features. Nvidia can do it because they have more driver developers and (this is a total guess) more focus on the professional market.

 

why do you use crossfire or sli dont you know both solutions pretty much have hardware limitations and technical difficulties thats beyond amd and nvidia to solve? I read about sli users who complain all day about how bad their sli works.

Buy a Fiji x run single card solves every issue on both brands.

 

Why are people so sold on that WHQL logo? It only means that Microsoft does some automated tests on the drivers which are only put in place in order to placate OEMs. Even though they're officially labelled "beta", any driver that you can publicly download from AMD or Nvidia has gone through their full internal QA.

 

I would prefer that both AMD and Microsoft are working for full QA pass. Not only AMD.

 

No shit, sherlock. However, if you lack the resources to release final drivers not even once every six months, you should just stop bothering and simply close up shop completely, because this is embarrassing. People are supposed to buy a 600-1000 dollar graphics card and run beta drivers on it 80% of the time? This is exactly why ATI started the whole catalyst scheme to begin with, to get away from their bad, irregularly released drivers label.

Oh, so you think overtly labelled beta software is just as good as release versions? Maybe you should go bridge shopping later today... If there wasn't a reason to not call it beta I'm sure AMD wouldn't call it beta, even though it was to lack WHQL cert. I'm pretty sure there's no law that says you MUST have WHQL cert for your display driver or else it must be labelled as beta software.

They're doing it as an excuse to just have something to release of course, and when something breaks, it's just *shrug*, "beta software".

 

Nope, I specifically talked about drivers from AMD and Nvidia, as you should have noticed since you quoted it.

That said, I wish some release versions of software, namely games, were as thoroughly tested as beta graphics drivers.

 

AMD describe the beta drivers as a preview of what they are working on. If there is a perception among AMD's customers that the beta driver isn't "finished" it's one of AMD's own making IMO.

 

How do you qualify a driver for a WHQL logo? Isn't it just a matter of Microsoft rerunning some regression suite that you're supposed to pass anyway?

 

Oh, I think I know what your implication was, but extra points there for being slippery.

Wether you don't think an over-reliance on beta software is a problem or not for AMD, fact is it IS a problem when a company lets half a year pass without any release quality driver. For once, it shows they've got no real commitment to quality or reliability with regards to driver development. A company with mission critical equipment experiencing driver issues, what are they supposed to do; install beta drivers? Who in their right mind would consider this a viable solution! Rolling back to a previous release driver would in AMD's case make said driver close to a year old, and might experience the same or other, just as bad issues. If your board/GPU is a new one, an older WHQL driver might not even support it. All this is clearly unacceptable, no wonder AMD's doing so poorly in the graphics market.

As for gamers, since catalyst has no mechanism to update crossfire profiles separately of the driver itself, you're either forced to accept poor performance, or again, run beta software.

That's actually neither here nor there. Like I said, if AMD's beta drivers were as good as a release driver, they wouldn't be called beta. This is obvious and self-evident to any non-apologist.

 

Really? AMD repeatedly released beta driver followed by WHQL-certified driver of the exactly same revision. AMD simply calls every non-WHQL driver "beta".

 

I thought beta just means it has not been thoroughly tested for stability and not that its not stable or not good or whatever. Personally I notice 0 difference between AMDs beta and 'release' drivers. They kinda just work without any issues.

Not that 'release' and WHQL drivers are always stable and perfect.

 

I guess if you crossfire a couple of 390x cards (for around 800 dollars) then you'll appreciate having more memory for 4k resolutions, or other extreme cases. Can't say I know what Windows 10 will actually deliver for crossfire users. Is the new feature for video memory on crossfired cards already working with the beta version of Windows? If so, then I think 8GB 390x cards aren't near as useful as they would be otherwise.

Edit: Yeah, I thought I might have assumed too much "There is a catch though, this is not done automatically, the new APIs allow memory stacking but game developers will need to specifically optimize games as such." http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/both-mantle-and-dx12-can-combine-video-memory.html
I googled and got that. So it will stay pay, for a long time, for crossfire users to think about getting cards with extra memory?

Edit 2: I guess there will be further investigation of how 4k will impact on 4GB cards. Given the prices involved, I expect potential customers to be relieved if they see it's not going to impact on their cards useability (given its expected time in the customers PC).
But there will always be customers who want a cushion, game at the extremes, and/or don't upgrade that often.
I think 4GB is a fair amount for most people who don't crossfire. For most people, and the scenarios they use their cards under, the card will run out of oomph before it runs out of memory.

 

http://videocardz.com/56225/amd-radeon-fury-x-3dmark-performance
3D Mark performance. Head to head with Titan X. Not very promising. (From an engineering point of view!)

 

They have just extrapolated the rumored performance of being 54% faster than a R9 290X.

 

I doubt it.

 

Why exactly is that not promising? Were you expecting something else?