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

[iMacmatician]

From TechPowerUp: "AMD Announces Never Settle Catalyst 12.11 Driver Update."

Catalyst 12.11 promises up to 15% performance improvements in the most modern games, such as Battlefield 3, DiRT Showdown, Sleeping Dogs, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and more. With these improvements, AMD is claiming performance leads for all its top products, over NVIDIA's. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, for example, gains 20% performance advantage over GeForce GTX 680; HD 7970 gains 15% over GTX 670, and HD 7950 20% over GTX 660 Ti.

 

[Ryan Smith]

From TechPowerUp: "AMD Announces Never Settle Catalyst 12.11 Driver Update."

I have to say I was completely surprised by just how much AMD's performance improved on BF3 in particular. Whatever it was that was holding back their performance, AMD has finally gotten a handle on it. They're completely competitive with NVIDIA now (at least in our BF3 benchmark).

 

[Dave Baumann]

Don't forget the bundles!

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/video/amd-offers-up-to-3-free-games-with-graphics-cards/

 

[DuckThor Evil]

That is a pretty sweet bundle!

 

[silent_guy]

I would love to be that fly on the wall that listens in when some driver programmer dude yells "holy shit, I found a way to accelerate this thing by 25%." I'm sure it must be a combination of optimizations and a lot of hard work grinding though shaders and what-not, but it's so very opaque to the external world.

If, one day, AMD or Nvidia would agree to write down the driver optimization's road to making a game run great on a particular GPU arch, I'd eat it up. Even if 5 years after the fact...

 

[HMBR]

I have to say I was completely surprised by just how much AMD's performance improved on BF3 in particular. Whatever it was that was holding back their performance, AMD has finally gotten a handle on it. They're completely competitive with NVIDIA now (at least in our BF3 benchmark).

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6393/51037.png

BF3 seems to be the favorite game of so many gamers, so this is a huge win, can NV answer somehow?

with those game bundles and current pricing it's hard to not recommend an AMD card

ah, you need to update the Bench/GPU 2012 I guess

 

[fellix]

For their part, AMD hasn’t told us much about what it is they’ve done to optimize their drivers. What we do know is that it’s not driver command lists (an optional DX11 feature that NV has supported for some time), so it has to be something else. AMD has briefly mentioned surface mapping and memory mapping optimizations, but it’s not clear what exactly they’ve done there and if those are the only optimizations.

So, there's still a good margin to improve performance in BF3 (and other DX11 titles/engines)?

 

[Alexko]

Now that, kids, is what a performance driver looks like.

I would love to be that fly on the wall that listens in when some driver programmer dude yells "holy shit, I found a way to accelerate this thing by 25%." I'm sure it must be a combination of optimizations and a lot of hard work grinding though shaders and what-not, but it's so very opaque to the external world.

If, one day, AMD or Nvidia would agree to write down the driver optimization's road to making a game run great on a particular GPU arch, I'd eat it up. Even if 5 years after the fact...

I second that. At this point, describing how to optimize for Half-Life 2 would probably not be a competitive problem, and would be very interesting.

Dave, if one of your coworkers feels like blogging…

 

[Kaotik]

Based on TPU review, the gains are notably bigger at lower resolutions, which would indicate to my understanding that most gains are from reducing CPU overhead in drivers

 

[Svensk Viking]

Nice improvements and bundle. Right on time too, now that I'm currently helping my brother decide what card to upgrade to

 

[UniversalTruth]

You mentioned TPU, I'll open my mouth but immediately.

This comment is intriguing, I don't have time now to investigate deeper but I tend to believe they really are willing to manipulate results.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2753684&postcount=31

 

[Gipsel]

Based on TPU review, the gains are notably bigger at lower resolutions, which would indicate to my understanding that most gains are from reducing CPU overhead in drivers

It doesn't have to be CPU overhead. Could also be reduced overhead/inefficiencies in the work distribution and scheduling on the GPU. All you need is a task with a basically fixed effort/overhead for all resolutions like setting up or initializing something. The results only tell you, that apparently the pixel shaders, TMUs and ROPs didn't get any faster. It leaves a range of possibilities in the pipeline before these.

 

[gongo]

Wow! Nice timing for my new 7970 >1Ghz edition! Feels good knowing i have the ...fastest single gpu this year!
AMD is killing it in their weak games...BF3, SC2, WOW, Crysis2...nice!
This kind of confirms AMD will not launch 28nm Seaisle series this year..? No reason to...when you have the fastest line up across the board!

Dang...feels crappy knowing now how my retailer can sell me a 7970 for such low prices....they took my free games....Mr Dave...would you be so kind enough to entertain my game begging...i just wants Sleeping Dogs....mmkay?

 

[lanek]

In general i find this type of improvement a bit suspicious, but after have read 4 review on this driver, look like we get the same effect have been seen on Dirt3 performance some drivers ago.

Good for my 7970's.. and will be fun with 3Dmark11 improvement to bench them again.

 

[ECH]

Can someone read this post and explain to me how you disable Cat AI in current AMD drivers? I thought that portion of CCC was inaccessible now a days? Also, how much of a performance loss do you get doing that? Albeit there maybe other topics of interest from that.

 

[Kaotik]

Can someone read this post and explain to me how you disable Cat AI in current AMD drivers? I thought that portion of CCC was inaccessible now a days? Also, how much of a performance loss do you get doing that? Albeit there maybe other topics of interest from that.

You can't disable Cat AI completely, as it features fixes and whatnot for actually broken things in games, too.
You can, however, disable all the iq optimizations which is what SKYMTL was most likely referring to (everything highest quality = no iq optimizations)

 

[ECH]

You can't disable Cat AI completely, as it features fixes and whatnot for actually broken things in games, too.
You can, however, disable all the iq optimizations which is what SKYMTL was most likely referring to (everything highest quality = no iq optimizations)

If he saying there is no IQ differences why are they going through the trouble of disabling optimizations in the driver (I'm not clear how they are doing this)? Wouldn't those optimizations help improve performance with AA, IQ and fix some things (something you already suggested)?

 

[Kaotik]

If he saying there is no IQ differences why are they going through the trouble of disabling optimizations in the driver (I'm not clear how they are doing this)? Wouldn't those optimizations help improve performance with AA, IQ and fix some things (something you already suggested)?

In this context "iq optimization" means performance gains through degrading iq (wether it's visible to naked eye is completely different thing of course)

All at max quality = no iq affecting optimizations used, cat ai still used as in, game specific fixes etc don't get disabled, crossfire doesn't get disabled etc (what old "disable cat ai" did)

And why go through the trouble? Of course to see if the "no iq affecting optimizations" -settings are still in fact just that, and not degrading iq to help performance.

 

[ECH]

In this context "iq optimization" means performance gains through degrading iq (wether it's visible to naked eye is completely different thing of course)

All at max quality = no iq affecting optimizations used, cat ai still used as in, game specific fixes etc don't get disabled, crossfire doesn't get disabled etc (what old "disable cat ai" did)

And why go through the trouble? Of course to see if the "no iq affecting optimizations" -settings are still in fact just that, and not degrading iq to help performance.

I understand that it's a good means to do it to compare/contrast results. Although I don't agree that it matters if you can't see any differences. It's those visual differences that count.

Moving forward, that isn't what I was referring to though. It was written that they always disable Cat AI in testing. I still don't know how you disable Cat AI in that context. I certainly like to know how that is being done because we haven't been able to disable Cat AI in the last few years since the revamp of CCC.

Why go through the trouble disabling portion(s) of CCC (something not easily accessible to most users...unless you are willing to demonstrate how) when there is no visual benefit in doing so? Would that hamper performance using AA, specific optimizations for games and other fixes (which you already stated)?

 

[karlotta]

..
Moving forward, that isn't what I was referring to though. It was written that they always disable Cat AI in testing. I still don't know how you disable Cat AI in that context. I certainly like to know how that is being done because we haven't been able to disable Cat AI in the last few years since the revamp of CCC.

..

Because he is talking Shit!(HC etall).