pc gaming after nextgen consoles

[eastmen]

Titan probably won't have any impact on game development. It costs too much. It'll make some benchmark people excited for awhile though. Nice for niche 3D users too maybe. And Davros' multi monitor setup....

Titan is tomorrow today . Its using the same tech as the 6x0 line and when 28nm gpus come out hopefully in the fall they will use new tech and being on a smaller micron will offer better performance / per watt .

Titan performance will drasticly drop in price as the year goes on . Depending on when the new cards are released titan performance may be $500 or so when the consoles launch later this year.

 

[dobwal]

There isn't much in the rumors concerning the DMEs that appear relevant to the contents of that paper.
The paper was concerning a scheme to make it easier for FPGA designers to use PCIe, since the protocol itself is complex and affected by the complex software and hardware environment in a PC.
Why would PCIe even be involved for Durango, when it's all on one chip?

Nothing about the description of the DMEs indicates they are as flexible as an FPGA, and at least one rumor flat out says they are fixed-function. DME bandwidth is an order of magnitude higher than the best bandwidth for this research paper, and the latencies reported look very bad for what an APU should be capable of doing.

edit:
Just to clarify something, I suspect from the information given so far that the DMEs are an elaboration of the DMA engines already present in GPUs. These are used for handing data transfers over the PCIe bus in GPUs, but they look to be useful for data movement even without the actual bus. Durango's rumored first two DMEs appear to be just that, and the remaining two with compression/decompression capability have extra hardware added to them. The limited data path that is shared amongst the DMEs and the video decode block makes me thing they are hanging off of the low-bandwidth hub all AMD GPUs have. This hub exists for ease of adding hardware that can function without a direct feed into the high-bandwidth cache system.

You are right, the dmas arent fpgas. The dmas, gpu and memory controller seems to be connected through a fpga that facillates high speed data transfer.

This a diagram of durango
http://www.vgleaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/memory_system.jpg

This is a diagram of a virtex 5 fpga (third diagram down)
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Highend-FPGA-comes-with-Linux/

DMA setups look similar.

Now here is a paper from MS research describing using streaming dmas, an fpga and SRAM.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/...A Engines and Intelligent ICAP Controller.pdf

The fpga is the interface itself.

 

[eastmen]

I don't get it dowbal shouldn't the move engines be connected to the ram instead off completely away from it ?

The diagram shows the ram off by the north bridge / gpu memory system and then the move engines between some type of write bar off to another side. How are these things helping to move data around if they are just connected to the gpu/ memory system .

 

[Jwm]

The biggest thing will be great looking games. You get console ports now that will run on 3 monitors with everything maxed out but with new consoles having such powerfull internals they will simply push pc gaming that much futher.

In 2 years people will actually need multiple cards again to run games on a single monitor at high settings and it will be glorious !

My poor mini-itx motherboard is weeping! Though it plays everything on high or ultra now so it is not a total loss yet.

I hope PC gets faster ports of games this time around, and we are sort of seeing that already to be honest, so I view that as a healthy thing.