AMD: Sea Islands R1100 (8*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

OK, I admit the difference between the first and the last one has to be pretty massive. I guess NVIDIA gets away with this because enthusiasts don't really pay attention to these cards.

 

There are really strong constraints on heat and cost, the OEM dictates some spec and nvidia provides a variation.
So unfortunately the consumer is left to search for this information, if you can find it at all. I would look at memory specs first. Whatever the GPU, if you want some level of gaming performance you ought to look for and find a gddr5 laptop.
It's like the bad old days of geforce FX5200 64bit vs 128bit (a 128bit one was decent, about a geforce 3/4 but the more common, crappy version.. that's unspeakable.)

 

SemiAccurate claims to have pictures, but doesn't actually want to show any proof of having any. Any word on specs and improvements yet?

 

People around here seem to have forgotten that there exists a thread dedicated to intercourse with Charlie, so go to that one if you need to vent. Feelings about one web hack or another do not technical discussion make. I will not delete the offending posts (the one above me is an example) yet, so that an example is left.

 

I assume the pictures are for subscribers only

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/01/16/amd-hd8950-spotted-in-the-wild-and-pictured/#.UPbv91y9LCQ

 

A free subscription will give access after 30 days.

 

Maybe the GCN+ chips will be +10, 8980, 8960, 8880 etc.

 

Quick note, the innuendo about how consumers are unwashed masses in need of a life upgrade got moved into its separate thread in RSPC, whilst some of the Charlie related innuendo got moved to the dedicated thread in RSPC. So those are the places to go for continuing either strand.

 

Sorry if I hosed up the thread, Alex Was not specifically my intention, I was mostly hoping to get out of that line of discussion by showing how absurd the thought truly was. I should probably stop talking about it now since it got moved, huh? D'oh

Alright, so back to Sea Islands:

To be purely honest with myself, even though all of you couldn't care less, my next video card upgrade will be an NVIDIA device. I've been an ATI / AMD purchaser since my 9500np -> 9800 Pro -> X1850XTPE -> Dual 3870's -> Dual 4850's -> 5850 -> my current 7970 OC edition. While I agree that AMD has been reasonably competitive from a pure performance standpoint, the last two generations of video cards have shown that NVIDIA's drivers, hardware and devrel simply offer far more of what I truly want.

 

Well the smoothness issues that AMD has been having seem to be all but worked out at this point:

http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times

I'm overstating that just a little, but AMD's casual attitude towards frame latency seems to have been adjusted. Music to my ears.

 

WOOO! Good news all around, thanks for the link. I can only thank everyone involved for getting this issue out into the open.

 

I'm still quite astonished how this is spoken only as "AMD problem" even if it was more pronounced on AMD, as nVidia has similar terrible frametimes in some games, including games where AMD has no issues (for example BF3, 1 map had AMD frametimes being crappy all over the chart while nVidia was doing ok, while the other map had nVidia frametimes all over the chart crappy and AMD frametimes were astonishing)

 

While I agree that it is not only an AMD issue, I'd argue that it is a bigger issue for AMD than it is for Nvidia. In the past, if someone were to make an argument for Nvidia having better drivers, this would have been where to make it. It's the only clear area where Nvidia had an advantage over AMD, although with Fermi it was very hit-and-miss.

It seems that the times are changing though, and as more reviewers (Alienbabeltech, PCPER, et. al) move towards frame latency, we should see a corresponding move from the vendors to smooth out the frame rate. I'm excited for the future.

 

Just have to hope they use settings which get FPS around their refreshrate or under, since anything over refreshrate and frametimes suddenly become next to obsolete as you can't know how big portion of which frame is even shown

 

Yes you can:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-New-Graphics-Performance-Metric

 

maybe some explanation for skyrim

First he do this test ( who nearly fix Frametimes ) set 1 core afinity.
http://benchmark3d.com/microstutter-case-study-skyrim-wtf-edition

The second part is maybe a bit more interesting.
http://benchmark3d.com/microstutter-case-study-skyrim-diving-deeper

 

Meant with TechReports method which doesn't include capture cards

 

Well right now everything that Scott has suggested is that FRAPs is a temporary, imperfect solution. He still believes it's superior to traditional average frame rate plotting, and I think we all agree on that.

 

Yes, that we can all agree on I'm sure

 

I'd say it's switched now. There are two similar situations: Stuttering issues with GeForce 600 and frame-times issues on Radeon HD 7000. I believe the stuttering was more significant problem for the end user, because it was more pronounced to naked eye. It took 3 months for Nvidia to deliver a driver fix. Tech Report found the frame-time issue with Radeons in December and it was resolved by AMD within 5 weeks.