AMD: Southern Islands (7*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

[lanek]

HWBOT accept tesselation disabled for world record and submission of scores..

ABSOLUTELY ALL scores are made without it .. point... if you dont do it you will not get a score who is at the level of other... no choice.

Im not right with that, but i have not the choice ..

Note, this is only used for High overclocking score, not by review...

And dont get the AMD optimized setting wrong.. it have absolutely no effect, or you will see 99% of the site who will have allready make an article about it when testing the 7970 vs the 680 ..

 

[3dcgi]

Does DX11 define a maximum tessellation factor?

Yes. It's 64.

 

[boxleitnerb]

And dont get the AMD optimized setting wrong.. it have absolutely no effect, or you will see 99% of the site who will have allready make an article about it when testing the 7970 vs the 680 ..

If it has no effect, why is it (still) there??? (the AMD optimized setting, not the slider in general)

The general problem with optimizations that are enabled by default is, that most reviewers don't touch the driver settings, thus unknowingly run benchmarks with these optimizations. It's true that in the case of tessellation this is not a problem - not yet. But a sour taste remains why they implemented it this way in the first place.

 

[eastmen]

If it has no effect, why is it (still) there??? (the AMD optimized setting, not the slider in general)

The general problem with optimizations that are enabled by default is, that most reviewers don't touch the driver settings, thus unknowingly run benchmarks with these optimizations. It's true that in the case of tessellation this is not a problem - not yet. But a sour taste remains why they implemented it this way in the first place.

Do you honestly believe that both nvidia and amd have no hidden optimisations that we can't find out about ?

 

[CarstenS]

HWBOT accept tesselation disabled for world record and submission of scores..

This is a - sorry to say so - dumb decision on HWBot's part. I wonder when they'll have a league for NULL render or something like that. That's btw one of the reasons I quit benchmarking over there - the rules just have become ridiculous.


That said, I welcome the Tessellation slider in the Catalyst driver. For one, it lets you enable tessellation when the game dev decided to put in excessive amounts of triangles that would kill your card otherwise. And - as a reviewer - it can provide a quick hint on how much a given scene is hindered by tessellation on radeons. What I would discount however, is the notion of this being especially beneficial to people with weaker cards - those tend to have comparatively abundant amounts of tessellation power. For example HD5570 all the way up to 5870 have the same tessellators and throughput per clock (Cedar has lower prim rate anyway), so tessellation would have less of an impact percentage wise on the slower cards.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Personally, when benchmarking, I think there should be no optimisations, as the point of the benchmark is to make the card do a given amount of work. Not doing that work is not completing the benchmark.

However, you've got to look at the fact that a benchmark is a comparison between cards, but that comparison does not necessarily reflect performance in other real-world applications.

In the real world, AMD customers have the ability to gain more performance by limiting over the top tessellation with little noticeable difference in the picture. This benefits the user where Nvidia was trying to hurt their competition (and their lower cards) by hammering on tesselation where they were particularly strong. AMD cut that out from Nvidia's legs by limiting the ability of any app to use stupidly unnecessary amounts of tessellation to no-one's benefit except making high end Nvidia cards look better in benchmarks than they are in the real world.

 

[CarstenS]

So, your reasoning basically boils down to: If it's hurting too much in the real world user's would dial down?

 

[lanek]

If it has no effect, why is it (still) there??? (the AMD optimized setting, not the slider in general)

The general problem with optimizations that are enabled by default is, that most reviewers don't touch the driver settings, thus unknowingly run benchmarks with these optimizations. It's true that in the case of tessellation this is not a problem - not yet. But a sour taste remains why they implemented it this way in the first place.

Buy an AMD card and test it .. sorry but i cant help otherwise..

You are saying AMD is cheating in DX11 games by enable lower level of tesselation in their driver ? forget it, it is not the case... There's enough pro Nvidia sites starting by Nvidia focus group who will have show this allready.

 

[Kaotik]

If it has no effect, why is it (still) there??? (the AMD optimized setting, not the slider in general)

The general problem with optimizations that are enabled by default is, that most reviewers don't touch the driver settings, thus unknowingly run benchmarks with these optimizations. It's true that in the case of tessellation this is not a problem - not yet. But a sour taste remains why they implemented it this way in the first place.

It has effect if/when AMD creates a profile for specific game, as far as I know, they haven't so far.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Buy an AMD card and test it .. sorry but i cant help otherwise..

You are saying AMD is cheating in DX11 games by enable lower level of tesselation in their driver ? forget it, it is not the case... There's enough pro Nvidia sites starting by Nvidia focus group who will have show this allready.

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying the intention of this slider was probably to cheat, but then the intended functionality was abandoned and no profiles ever came. So what harm is there in removing the AMD optimized setting altogether?

 

[lanek]

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying the intention of this slider was probably to cheat, but then the intended functionality was abandoned and no profiles ever came. So what harm is there in removing the AMD optimized setting altogether?

My bad sorry... and yes on this point you are right.

 

[Kaotik]

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying the intention of this slider was probably to cheat, but then the intended functionality was abandoned and no profiles ever came. So what harm is there in removing the AMD optimized setting altogether?

Huh?

The slider is there and works, user can use it to whatever he wants to.
AMD Optimized has nothing to do with the slider (though there was in one point a bug which left "user controlled" on even if AMD optimized was ticked, IIRC), it does nothing except if there's a profile for the game you're running. The fact there's no profiles currently doesn't mean there won't be in future.

If they planned it "cheating wise", you can be damn sure it wouldn't be in CCC visible, it would be invisible for the user and do it's job.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Huh?

The slider is there and works, user can use it to whatever he wants to.
AMD Optimized has nothing to do with the slider (though there was in one point a bug which left "user controlled" on even if AMD optimized was ticked, IIRC), it does nothing except if there's a profile for the game you're running. The fact there's no profiles currently doesn't mean there won't be in future.

If they planned it "cheating wise", you can be damn sure it wouldn't be in CCC visible, it would be invisible for the user and do it's job.

I meant the whole thing in general, that wasn't clear, my bad. The slider itself is fine. But what reviewer changes the driver settings? Almost none. So if there are profiles at some point (will AMD tell us in detail? How will it be communicated if at all?), the optimizations are automatically on and create an unfair advantage. You can always count on the uninformed masses that look at the pretty graphs and don't read the text (if it were to mention such a "shortcut" at all). Cheats don't always have to be 100% secret, you just need to get away with it

I dislike every kind of default optimization that has visible effect on image quality. For example, I would like to see HQ-AF as default for every card, be it Radeon or Geforce. It is not AMD's or Nvidia's job to decide what image quality I can have by default. If there is some poor implementation of some feature, go to the developer as it is he who did it and has final authority over his product. If later the user wants to change some quality setting manually, completely fine. But not by default, no way.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

So, your reasoning basically boils down to: If it's hurting too much in the real world user's would dial down?

Yeah, they would, and they wouldn't notice the difference even in (deliberately?) badly coded games like Crysis 2 where there's masses of unnecessary tessellation.

So while a benchmark is a specific workload that stresses the card and shouldn't be messed with for measuring that artificial workload, it ceases to bear a relationship to the real world. In the real world, AMD users can and do limit the tessellation factor to the DX11 limit of 64. Nvidia tries to make themselves look better with stupid levels of tessellation that only benefits their high end cards but wins them benchmark wins.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that there is nothing wrong with a benchmark that just shows a comparison of workloads, and cheats should not be acceptable there. If someone asks you to run from A to B, then they want to see how fast you run from A to B.

But, you have to understand the relationship (or lack thereof) of such results in the real world where other things come into play, and those gaming workloads are optimised/reorganised by all IHVs for maximum benefit to the customer. Why do something the old, slow way, when you can do it faster and better in a new way? That is, after all what a customer wants with the newest hardware.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying the intention of this slider was probably to cheat, but then the intended functionality was abandoned and no profiles ever came. So what harm is there in removing the AMD optimized setting altogether?

It was never about cheating, is was about giving the user control over tessellation, when it became apparent that Nvidia was going to pay devs to put ridiculous amounts of tessellation into everything because that was the thing they were good at and it would make AMD cards look worse in benchmarks.

If it was a cheat, why would AMD put the controls in the control panel where everyone could see what it was set to and could turn it off, instead of just hiding it in the driver?

 

[upnorthsox]

It was never about cheating, is was about giving the user control over tessellation, when it became apparent that Nvidia was going to pay devs to put ridiculous amounts of tessellation into everything because that was the thing they were good at and it would make AMD cards look worse in benchmarks.

If it was a cheat, why would AMD put the controls in the control panel where everyone could see what it was set to and could turn it off, instead of just hiding it in the driver?

Just an observation, but if you turn something off and then don't give people a way to turn it back on, it's hard to call it a feature.

 

[boxleitnerb]

It was never about cheating, is was about giving the user control over tessellation, when it became apparent that Nvidia was going to pay devs to put ridiculous amounts of tessellation into everything because that was the thing they were good at and it would make AMD cards look worse in benchmarks.

If it was a cheat, why would AMD put the controls in the control panel where everyone could see what it was set to and could turn it off, instead of just hiding it in the driver?

Don't be naive. The intentions are clear, why else the AMD optimized setting at all, and at default even? Again: The control slider itself is not the issue, the default setting is. And as I said, not every cheat has to be secret. Sure, some sites would call them on it, but my guess is, most won't and use the driver defaults as they have always done. Even at the time when AMDs AF was shimmery and inferior.

 

[Alexko]

Just an observation, but if you turn something off and then don't give people a way to turn it back on, it's hard to call it a feature.

The driver option doesn't disable tessellation, it just reduces it to reasonable levels.

 

[lanek]

Don't be naive. The intentions are clear, why else the AMD optimized setting at all, and at default even? Again: The control slider itself is not the issue, the default setting is. And as I said, not every cheat has to be secret. Sure, some sites would call them on it, but my guess is, most won't and use the driver defaults as they have always done. Even at the time when AMDs AF was shimmery and inferior.

If you want to make a close with FP16 demotion.. you are in the wrong way, due to this tricks who was working only on some games ( basically old games outside Dirt1 ) ... Nvidia have start use FP16 demotion just on the 460 release.... (what is funny is the FP16 demotion is a technic described by Nvidia at first and you can find it in their whitepaper )

At this moment reviewer have start use Catalyst AI on HQ level who remove all AMD optimisation per games ( who is not completely justified as most of the optimisation are justified .. ).. You can watch all review they mention they put the catalyst AI on the max level...

At the same time, nvidia dont let you choose if you want use or not use thoses optimisations ( like FP16 demotion ), they are invisible and you cant disable them .. I just want to recall HawX episode, where the MSAA was magically transformed in 4xCSAA instead of 4xMSAA for Nvidia cards ( who ofc let a big difference in term of performance. ) ( one example in one hundreds ) .. (developpers have appologize for this error, saying it was a bug in the settings control ..

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Just an observation, but if you turn something off and then don't give people a way to turn it back on, it's hard to call it a feature.

Have you even seen the control panel options? There are three settings:

1. AMD optimised which defaults to "application settings" if there is no profile.

2. Application settings which gives exactly what the application asks for ie disables any limiting in the driver.

3. User configurable that allows the user to chose any level of tesselation between "off" and "64x".

You can't get any more transparent or give the customer any more options.

What's sad is that AMD felt they had to implement this is in order to stop the Nvidia spoiler operation that was simply designed to hurt the gaming experience of AMD customers. What's sad is that Nvidia was happy to sacrifice the gaming experience of their own customers who didn't buy the very highest of their cards that could actually run acceptably at these ridiculous settings.

Everyone gets screwed over so that Nvidia can look good in a few benchmarks.