AMD: R9xx Speculation

I think we all hyped ourselves up on the rumours. At one point we were expecting a 6970 that would destroy GTX580. The reality is that AMD did the same as they did last time around. ie 5970 sometimes under or sometimes equal to GTX580 for a lot less money, with 6990 coming in on top of the GTX580.

Overall I think the launches are solid. Decent products, good prices, lots of availability, a lot of profit for AMD. If you bought a 6870, you'll probably be a bit disappointed you could have got a 6950 for only £25-30 more if you'd waited.

 

I'm disappointed too, not that the products (I include HD68xx) are bad per themselves but when I consider the new naming scheme, the size of chip, the perf per mm2, the fact that to me AMD is a bit out of schedule... the whole thing has a bitter after taste.
The chips are too big to me, the perf/Watt have gone down, they let Nvidia catch up and find themselves in a situation where they have to sell big chip + 2GB of ram for cheap.
I don't agree with people that think that it's good for AMD business, I'm not sure their margin are great, it has to be the same for Nvidia but on the financial aspect Nvidia is in a better shape than AMD.
Too big, why could they stick to their sweet spot theory? Damned.

From my pov caymans are more "wrong" than Barts. I would push and say Caymans should not exist. Barts should have benefit from some of the architectural enhancements found in caymans. Taking these enhancement in account Barts may well have match or exceed by a bit Cypress performances (which are still respectable, Damien had a great idea when he though of including the HD5870 2GB in his review ). More with bart done right AMD would have mostly already launch its high end 69xx. The card would be still be king of the hill while offering impressive power and thermal characteristic, they could still sell it at a premium.

I don't like the idea that AMD has no refresh for the HD57xx.

I feel like AMD should have focused on only two chips, Barts done right (68xx) and Kurts (but has replacement for HD57xx).

 

Nope. The moment of release you're looking for is being held back until Antilles launches. Then you'll feel the exaltation and euphoria you've been looking for, and can roll over and go to sleep.

 

Has the use of the dual bios ever been expound upon? It makes me wonder if AMD plans on bios updates at some future date Although I don't see that happening .

 

If Antilles is a dual-chip card people won't be as excited as you think. Those cards never generate a lot of excitement cause they're just too niche. Like BZB said, the excessive hype killed this launch even though the products themselves are ok.

 

those days I'm amazed that GPU (and drivers) work at all, they're so amazingly complex.
so, good launch

 

Charlies' take on 32nm/40nm
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/12/20/what-happened-amds-northern-islands/
Seems pretty plausible filling out of Daves' one liner.

Also why he wrote few articles later on: was under NDA.
I could have sworn he always said he doesn't do NDAs

 

You know full well that Antilles is a dual GPU card, and the hype is self-generated so I don't think it killed the launch at all. As far as being too niche, that depends on price point. If it's priced like Hemlock was then the people who are interested in it won't care it's dual GPU, if it's priced like Fermi GF110... then people still won't care. If it's under 580 pricing then people might consider the pros/cons of Crossfire on a stick, but it's not going to be less than $500 IMO.

 

Products are NOT OK.

Only the 6950 is barely OK (compared to 5870), 6970 isn't at all...

1- Barely better performance, similar perf/area.
2- Considerably worse perf/watt (~15%).
3- One year later.

Cypress' bottlenecks don't seem to have been adressed except the back-end one, probably the only reason for Cayman to not be a total failure.

Barts has been designed with some of Cypress' issues in mind and ended as a quite good GPU (similar perf/watt and 15% better perf/area), Cayman simply is a new design not trying to counter these issues, with the exact opposite result.


OK GPU products would be a Cayman Pro with actual XT performance and XT ~20% above that with their actual respective power draws. That'd not be "very good" but "OK".

As for the boards, GTX570 is better than HD6970 and GTX560 has quite a high chance of being better than HD6950 too. Not everyone use more than 1 monitor, so their biggest differentiator vanishes whereas GTX570 and 580 went better with respect to noise levels (and even perf/watt as far as the 6970 is concerned).


All in all, these boards are almost useless on the market, as much as the GTX470/480 back then and with the "halo" against them on top of that.

 

I agree that 6970 isn't all that great, but I think 6950 is a solid product. It has better perf./W than 5870 or even 5850.

 

Seems we are reading diffrent articles. What I gather is that the 650 offers better than 5870 performance at $100 less , the 6970 is 30% or so faster than the 5870 while costing $40 less .

It seems to be a good product jump. I sugest you read more reviews

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/AMD_Radeon_6970_6950_-_Featured_Review

Heck in alot of games the 6970 is faster than the 5970 which was selling for $600 or more a few weeks beforel uanch.

Its not a gtx 580 killer, but then again its not priced as a gtx 580 killer.

 

Price is just a variable you adjust based on actual product positioning.

In terms of performance, HD6970 ~ GTX570 ~ GTX480, that's a fact. Power draw nearly identical to GTX570's is a fact, too. Higher noise, too, and price is almost the same, too.

That's not ~30% faster than HD5870 but ~15%, not enough to be worth a new design, really.

Sure, it's not as bad as the infamous GTX480, but the margin is quite small, if I prefered the 5870 back then, then this 6970 is just another GTX480, 6 more months later.

 

It's 15% on average, but more like 0-30%, really. Some games get a huge boost and that's more important, IMO, as a uniform 15-20% is not worth an upgrade. You'll actually get a noticeable difference in playability.

 

Call of Pripyat goes over 60% faster than HD5870 E6 at Eyefinity settings.

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/File:6970-STALKEREF-Sun.jpg

Neither's what you'd call playable though.

I wonder why there's such a big gain there. Guess we'll never know. Not even sure if I care, to be honest.

 

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/AMD_Radeon_6970_6950_-_Featured_Review_Page_3

Huh, "The Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 benchmarks were done on the 10.8 drivers, on 16:10 1920x1200 monitors. The Radeon HD 6900 and 6800 benchmarks were done on the pre-release drivers for each card, and on 16:9 1920x1080 monitors. Historical analysis shows us that the slightly lower resolution on the 16:9 panels can give a few fps, but the numbers here are still highly comparable"

And before someone else mentions it: "my system has gathered a certain amount of cruft due to games being installed and removed, and the video drivers being updated on a regular basis."

I'm tremendously grateful to WSGF for the help I've gotten over the years and I don't want to take anything away from the hard work of their great review.

Only reason I went to the test setup page, and for some reason on my system it was tricky to navigate to, is because I was truly intrigued by how well the 6870 fared vs. the 5870.

So, like what was said, we might need to adjust some comparisons by a certain percentage.

 

I'm not sure how its a fact.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/12/14/amd_radeon_hd_6970_6950_video_card_review

They have the 6970 trading blows with the gtx 580 and they list the 6950 as beating the 570

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1051&type=expert&pid=4

Here it seems to be inbetween the gtx 570 and 580 with the 6950 just behind the gtx 570 and for some reason they are factoring in 1680x1050 results in there.


And I already posted the widescreen gaming numbers wehre you can see even more diffrences moving foward to ever higher resolutions .


Is the card perfect ? No , but as a 5850 owner i see a great improvement by going to a 6970.

Here is another good review tested with some diffrent drivers http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Catalyst_10.12_Performance/3.html

Its good to obecause we can see from the 9.10s the 5870 gain good performance through till the 10.12s

 

I went from a 5970, yes, 5970 to 6970 and it is honestly a massive improvement. Metro 2033 is actually playable at 2560x1600 with all the details cranked and tessellation on. Crysis is completely smooth, while on my 5970 it stuttered erratically. I've also noticed L4D2 is MUCH smoother, even though I was averaging well over 100 FPS on the 5970.

Maybe the 6900 series isn't all that impressive for those of you that game at lower resolutions like <1200p but at high res it really shines.

 

Difference between 6970 and GTX580 is very similar to 5870/GTX480, did you mentioned 570/580 launch as a failure too then? 570 provides 480 performance with a lower price, same did 6950 with 5870. Another difference is, 580 is the same GPU as 480 (just a fixed chip), while Caymans are a new generation, we should see more gains as drivers mature.

 

Where are you getting these prices? Pretty sure 5870 was street priced about 299 just before 6970 launched (it's past launch now, but they can currently be had as low as $250 after rebate. While 6970's MSRP was $370. Yet you claim 6970 was $40 cheaper? You're off by $110.

6970 was priced exactly where it had to be based on it's disappointing performance. It performs like a 570 (even less sometimes) and is priced similarly. $370 vs $350 for the 570. AMD surely knows the fact 6970 is 2GB justifies the extra $20.

It remains true, by far the single best stat if you want to know a video cards performance remains price...

 

Isnt it universally accepted that the GTX480/GTX580 is 15% faster than the HD5870/HD6970 overall?

I still think the inconsistency in the HD6970 performance numbers make it less favorable than the GTX570. Unless its due to immature drivers of course..