You should have waited and got the Blockchain Edition.
AMD Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 12 and Vega 20 Rumors and Discussion
That is very, very interesting! Maybe they were waiting for the implementation until the patent publication? Probably wishful thinking.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
This appears to be an elaboration of the triangle seive method for the PS4, or a more formal adoption of a compute culling shader from a game engine as a new step at the graphics front end.
The primitive shader itself has signs of similar concepts being part of its heritage, but the patent shows that its new shaders are run as a filter in front of the whole graphics pipeline, which is not where primitive shaders are.
Vega's pipeline creates a merged version of the vertex shader and culling shader somewhere after input assembly or the tessellation stage, whereas this method sits wholly outside.
The idea of compiling a vertex shader, and setting a compiler mode that declares all non-position code dead harkens back to Mark Cerny's description of the optional triangle sieve, though the idea likely applies to all three schemes.
The primitive shader itself has signs of similar concepts being part of its heritage, but the patent shows that its new shaders are run as a filter in front of the whole graphics pipeline, which is not where primitive shaders are.
Vega's pipeline creates a merged version of the vertex shader and culling shader somewhere after input assembly or the tessellation stage, whereas this method sits wholly outside.
The idea of compiling a vertex shader, and setting a compiler mode that declares all non-position code dead harkens back to Mark Cerny's description of the optional triangle sieve, though the idea likely applies to all three schemes.
Jawed
Legend
I suspect there'll be another patent application along at some point that describes the formation of attribute shading (for non-position attributes) from automatic compilation. Remember, attribute shading is something that can be deferred until the pixel shader, so a description of that process (automatic extraction of non-position shading instructions, vertex index collation, generation of code and whatever else) has its own complexities and is "off topic" for a patent on culling.
firstminion
Newcomer
I think you are referring to the JIT compiler, skimming over the paper I read explicitly that shaders for the graphics pipeline are automatically generated.
Yes. The PS4's method was described as being an option explicitly invoked by a developer, while the patent describes this being done automatically. The concept of taking a vertex shader as the source, then compiling a variant with only transformation elements that send a culled stream to the front end is shared. Unlike primitive shaders, the other two methods keep the vertex shader as-is, in the same place.
A primitive shader would in the apparently cancelled automatic scheme would have had a similar vertex shader source, though it would relocate and make conditional non-position calculations. Perhaps the developer-exposed version AMD is promising would behave like the PS4's scheme with an explicit compile, and the option to use it if it helps.
It stands out to me that the PS4's method was noted as needing some testing just to determine whether the culling stage was worthwhile, rather than assuming it should be done, while the automatic methods appear to be unused or cancelled.
Anyone have any inside details on current HBM2 prices? Closest thing I found was speculation from last year mentioning the 8 GB for Vega was estimated to be around $160 on it's own. $80 for 4 GB seems like a tough pill to swallow for Kabylake-G if the prices really are that high [still].
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
It's really hard to believe all types of volatile and non-volatile memory are continuously suffering from mega shortages all over the world for almost a year now. Especially when smartphones had their first ever sales volume reduction in Q4 2017.
I think we're in for some worldwide price fixing lawsuits during 2018.
I think we're in for some worldwide price fixing lawsuits during 2018.
Bondrewd
Veteran
HOPEFULLY
Also NAND prices are finally going down following the 64L ramp from multiple vendors.
Anarchist4000
Veteran
I think it has more to do with SSDs replacing magnetic storage. Once you start stacking, the amount of silicon wafer used can be huge. Fabs are likely price gouging a bit, but they are also trying to build more facilities which takes a substantial amount of capital. Situation gets worse if Korea somehow gets blown up, but it stands to reason they are diversifying a bit geographically at some expense along with the move away from globalism. It may be price fixing, but there are also legitimate reasons for prices to be higher.
RAM (and by extension, NAND) is traditionally an extremely cyclical market. Gluts and shortages take years to resolve as you have to wait for more capacity to come online or for someone to go bankrupt and exit the industry.
D
Deleted member 2197
Guest
So what did we learn here? @Scott_Arm needs to promise to stay away from PC gaming so the rest of us can get normal priced GPUs
