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

No one will be gaming at that resolution with just one card. Especially people with budgets for that kind of set up. As for 2560, I have not seen anything leaked that suggest it's no faster than the 580 at that res? I also don't get the "people on 1080p" won't go for this card... That is pretty loony.

 

GTX 580 1.5GB 490$ vs 3.0GB 590$
since 7970/50 use faster memories, price difference may be higher..

 

Of course, it is.
These sort of numbers are half useless. They just refer to individual blocks. They don't tell you how these units are wired or how/when they are used or how efficient these units are. And these are the kind of things that make an architecture.

That's how these numbers are calculated in the first place.

The real number to look out for is bandwidth. Tahiti has 50% more bw than Cayman, and if the performance increases by >50% vs Cayman, you can be sure that a dumb scaling of Cayman wouldn't have cut it.

It's a pretty good evolution. These days, you are not going to get >10% improvement unless you shrink.

 

That's some good thinking! Thanks to you and the rest of the guys as well!

So a 7950 1.5GB could be very well priced and with some OC it could hit 7970 performance, with significantly less money. That is for people like me, that will not need the 3GB versions anyway.

Things just got interesting regarding the 79XX for me!

 

Yeah, 4k monitors are ludicrously expensive, and will continue to be so for years. Nothing to get panties in a bind over.

 

That's a very good point. And some of the leaked slides show +60% over the GTX 580, so probably at least as much over the HD 6970.

 

Yeah, you can tell I'm rather GPU architecture ignorant. Thanks to you guys, I'm learning. I knew if I put those numbers out there you guys would give me context and help me understand how GCN is better.

 

Yes, but OTOH the 3GB GTX 580 is more of a "special" part whereas the 3GB 7950 is a "normal" part, which could make the difference smaller. If you look at instance for the difference between 1 and 2 GB HD 6950 it is quite small. Based on that I'd guess the difference won't be more than 50$.

 

I would wager that it is about 50% faster than Cayman, unless independent benchmarks show up. (Leaked slides are showing 60%, so it's more like 40% in reality and about 10% between Cayman and gf110).

 

I agree. FLOPS for comparison are one aspect, another would be branch-efficiency which we know went up. No problem being twice as fast with the same FLOPS. As such I can't really understand the appeal in the number-orgy the previous poster made. We're not in the age of embarassing parallel fruits anymore.

 

Why would you not need 3GB? BF3 already uses 1.4GB of VRAM according to Dice at highest settings 1080P (they blamed the stuttering problems some saw on VRAM shortage). Crysis 2 hi res pack recommends 2GB card. For the future of course this will only increase no matter what resolution you run.

Too me that's one of the Nvidia lineup's biggest problems. GTX570's with 2.5GB VRAM are prohibitively expensive, I've seen reviews love the 560 Ti 448 with it's 1280 MB, too me a $300 graphics card needs to be more future proofed than 1280 MB...

 

I still see people recommending cards with 1GB VRAM only. It usually takes some convincing for them to realize 2GB is the sweet spot right now.

 

Oh I'm not expecting the average to be anywhere near 60%, but I don't think AMD would make things up either, so these cases probably do exist. And they're clear evidence of efficiency improvements, at least for these specific games.

 

Will having 3Gigs of vram increase Hardware Reserve on 32bit OS?

 

yea i think so, although at least in win 7 you can unclick the maximum memory checkbox in msconfig and it dynamically reserves ram as necessary.

but im pretty sure whatevers on the graphics memory has to be duplicated in ram. it would be interesting to see what happens anyway, i guess everything would end up in the page file?

 

But they can always cherry pick them.

 

I'm perfectly fine with 1080p and 1 card.

 

64bit OS are pretty common now and sells well.

 

2x6pin pci-e's eh?