AMD Radeon RDNA2 Navi (RX 6500, 6600, 6700, 6800, 6900 XT)

The card is trading blows with the RTX Quadro 5000 (which is a 2080 Super GPU), and loses big time in DXR tests. I don't understand how this qualifies as a good showing for RDNA2 at all.

 

Agreed. While I expect more reviews to come, currently there is only one W6800 review that includes some benchmarks against the A5000.

 

It's not too easy these days to get your hands on an A5000.

 

so..., it seems those darned pirates are actually the culprit of the GPU stock situation. The wave of second hand sales of GPUs has begun

https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TVert&from=&to=en&a=https://www.noticias3d.com/noticia.asp?idnoticia=85236

where do you live if that's not asking much? No GPUs here in Galiza

 

20-25% off msrp if you buy 200 units of a card that's been running 24/7 for upwards of a year? Where do I sign up.

 

Austria.

Second hand from miners? Nah... i'm not really in a hurry, still can wait

 

lucky boy you are. Me too, I can wait.

Oh and by the way, miners are selling everything in China, nVidia 3070 can be purchased at 339€ there.

https://www.translatetheweb.com/?re...x-3070-por-339-euros-los-mineros-venden-todo/

 

Oh wow, want to by some (many)

 

I've never considered buying a second hand GPU, but I'm pretty sure I'll be changing that policy soon.

 

Ooooh. May the same thing happen everywhere else once ETH switches to proof of stake. Some people that think crypto is just some fungible neverending pot of money just go "jUsT sWiTcH tO a DiFfErEnT cOiN", but considering how closely GPUs have tracked to ETH price over the past 9 months or so here's to hoping.

 

This really is the trigger that we're missing.

Getting slight discounts off MSRP on cards that have been working 24/7 for 8 months is still a crappy deal IMO.
Had the crypto craze not happened, at this point we'd be having those discounts on new cards.

I say hold the wallets and let the miners get desperate to push those GPU prices down, which will eventually stop the retailers from scalping us as well.
I'm not sorry for anyone in the distribution chain. They've had their fat cows for 8 months, now it's our turn.

 

Do you think they would have increased market share by increasing prices ?

 

actually, it was always meant to be our time. Because those are very complex devices that evolved thanks to gaming and gamers. It makes me smirk when I see some people who never saw a GPU in their life have webs about crypto and they just sound like experts "Intel is going to release a GPU with these specs" -add a few words here as if they knew what a GPU is and what they are talking about"..., what greed does to the human being, suddenly you lift a rock and 5 GPU experts appear.

Worst of them are some miners who are gamers. I had this colleague in the first crypto craze back in late 2017 who told me, when I started to complain about the lack of GPUs and overprices he replied: "who care about gamers?". He is one of them, and has a very expensive gaming laptop and a very powerful gaming desktop PC.

 

The first crypto craze started in autumn 2010 and lasted almost a year.

HD 5870 was a "victim" of that craze. It was the card to use for mining.

Meanwhile, my poor Fury Nano is finally burning itself to death. Must be all the fire spells I'm casting in The Witcher. Sigh. So I've pulled the trigger on the XFX 6900XT Merc 319 BLACK Limited, which is about 15% "over-clocked" versus reference 6900XT, being an XTX version of the chip.

Wonders... how many 6900XTs I could buy with the shitcoins my Fury Nano mined...

 

I think this is a bit late but RDNA 2 supports blending for the RGB9E5 (shared exponent) render target format ... (check for E5B9G9R9_UFLOAT_PACK32 in Vulkan)



As anyone can see from the above exchange, the main use case is HDR rendering. Higher quality than R11G11B10F and 2x the bandwidth saved compared to formats with FP16 channels ...

 

It's also the preferable format for run-time HDR probes. It was a very good thing to add this. The format is very low complexity.

 

Unfortunately, only AMD offers native support for blending to this particular RT format ...

Apple also advertises support for the format as well but I don't know if it's HW accelerated or emulated with tile memory ...

Other desktop IHVs could emulate the format with ROVs/interlocks but it would be pretty slow ...

 

Should we expect it on the consoles then?

 

Based on the initial code dump for Navi 21 in PAL, it's a possibility that the Xbox Series consoles also supports this format. All references to "GFX102PLUS" are removed thereafter ...

 

It seems that up to A10, both 11-11-10 and 9-9-9-5se take 64 bits in tile memory (probably expanded to FP16), whereas from A11 both formats are directly supported in tile memory.
https://developer.apple.com/documen...rstanding_color-renderable_pixel_format_sizes

There may be cases where conversion from FP16 on tile write may actually be preferable. I'm not sure whether Metal allows you to do that explicitly.