Zoraptor

If it really is the 6800 nonXT I'd say it's better than not bad. That would have been very top end expectation for the 6900XT's RT performance, a week ago. I will be very highly amused if AMD has been sandbagging on the upscaling front as well.

The flip side of being well regarded by fans is that journos will look for anything they can to drag them down.

That Linux tech has existed for a couple of years, iirc, and is theoretically vendor agnostic. In theory the MS/ Windows implementation is vendor agnostic too, but it's fair to say that AMD is likely to milk SAM for all it's worth anyway.

If I had to guess, 3070Ti (GA102) sometime early next year, 3080Ti... not sure we'll get one. A price drop on 3090 is more likely, imo, if there is a 3080Ti I'd suspect it would have the full bus and 12GB VRAM as its main selling point. Assuming, from the leasked slides, that Ti is the preferred naming scheme this gen. 3070Ti as a rescue bin for failed GA102 makes sense, especially if the rumours of yield problems are true. An extra 2GB of RAM and some speed over the 3070 give sales points, and that approach adds stock to the obviously depleted GA102 pool. A 3080Ti however would just spread that pool around even more shallowly and while there is a big gap in price from 3080-90 the performance gap is small. My suspicion is that SUPER cards, and if they arrive it would be around a years time, will be reserved for a node switch to TSMC for the GA102 based product line (with the GA102 Samsung line probably being retired). That's if they don't simply decide to rename the whole GA102 suite to 4000 or 3XX0 series if they switch nodes.

Attacking other people's patriotism is a simple yet effective rhetorical device. "If you like ___ so much, why don't you move there?" is perhaps the staple reflex question when suggesting somewhere else does something better, and has been forever. It's a worthless rhetorical device designed to attack the arguer rather than the argument, and shift the argument's subject. Should be noted though, that type of argument is hardly coming only from the R side of the 'debate'. 99% of accusations of people shilling for Russia are exactly the same, attempts to attack the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. A solid number of anti Trumpers are 100% convinced that anyone who supports him has to be a 'traitor' and think the- utterly unsubstantiated- peepee tapes etc are gospel.

The cache is meant to be used in concert with very aggressive on chip culling to reduce data to/ from the memory. It's also a pretty obvious interim step towards chiplet/ mcm videocards, and has the side effect of reducing heat. The 16GB of memory is definite overkill, but it isn't that expensive and gives marketing advantages over nVidia. I'd happily have a gentleman's bet about AMD 'winning' the raytracing battle if you want. RTX will no doubt linger on as nVidia specific branding since they've invested a lot into it, but it's 'dead' as physX long term, for the same reasons. The only games that will have nVidia specific solutions will be where nVidia pays them specifically to block AMD- or at the moment Vulkan games*, since (ironically, after who made Mantle) the only full release raytrace module there is the nV one. Everything else will be plain old DXR (and Vulkan_RT when released). If the rumours about raytracing performance on AMD being ~2070/80 level were true I'd be more bullish on RTX's future but AMD has solidly leapfrogged Turing with their first try, and isn't that far behind Ampere. *So at the moment the only (?) RTX game that fundamentally cannot run on AMD's solution is Youngblood, since it's Vulkan, the rest use DX12U/ DXR. And since I complain about nVidia co-opting others' technologies with their branding per RTX I/O etc, should be pointed out that SAM is actually yet another MS tech this time with AMD branding, and should work on more than just Zen 3 CPUs including (theoretically) the nextbox.

For years the only non miniature red pumpkins available here that were (occasionally) sold came with the disclaimer that you should feed them to livestock when finished with them, which was not encouraging. I kind of presumed things were different in the US since everywhere seemed to have pumpkin pie for sale as a dessert when I was last there- I'm not sure I've ever seen it offered here. Since I've been prompted I checked my seed catalogues and we do now have a good tasting carving pumpkin available (variety name "Jack o' Lantern", appropriately enough; though the seed supplier is pretty niche and it isn't available retail) but it's a bit late to try planting any now plus I don't have the space. Something to try for next year though.

Yeah, fundamentally you cannot ever get around weight as the primary factor. But reusability meant it was very complicated and had to be overengineered- partly why it was so heavy of course- and especially once it started having problems the economies of the reusability equation reversed due to the amount of maintenance and safety checks required. If you're at the stage of almost having to completely disassemble a complicated vehicle for safety checks you're likely to be better off using a simpler single use vehicle instead. Ultimately, If you sat down in 2010 to decide on a Shuttle replacement that took its mistakes into account you'd inevitably end up with something less complicated, more reliable and lighter rather than doubling down on a space plane- and you tend to get those things but making stuff single use. The counterpoint being the Shuttle was late 70s/ early 80s tech and there was 30 (40 now) years of advances since then- and it certainly is one of the great ironies that it was failures with the boosters rather than the reusable shuttle itself which caused the fatal problems. So yeah, arguments for/ against both approaches.

Yeah, it's a fair bit behind a 3080 whichever card it is, but If you said that any AMD card would have ~20% better raytracing performance than a 2080Ti 6 months ago most people would have thought you were licking toads or something. Best case scenario is probably that it's 6800XT, and if the AIBs can really get the clocks up to 2.4Ghz as some of the leaked benchmarks suggest that would make up a lot of the deficit to 3080 in raytracing (assuming clockspeed is the limiting factor, of course).

I don't think there's anything more behind the 6800 pricing than it being a rescue bin for failed chips and not wanting to cut down good chips for it without extra margin- similar to Radeon 7/ Instinct. One of the things that certainly did surprise me was the 6800 being 60CU and otherwise identical to both cards above it though, I definitely thought there would be a ~60CU 'native' chip. The same cache amount seems odd too, does a single error in the cache instantly result in a failed chip? Can't see it being a great overclocker, presumably some of the failed chips will be due to not being able to maintain clocks in general rather than outright failed hardware sections. I suspect exclusivity agreements are the reason for some features barely being mentioned. On paper, that raytracing is... better than decent, and they've said nothing about specialist hardware based raytracing being present. Technically, they just implied it wasn't by talking about the work being done by CUs instead of dedicated hardware, but it's a weird implication to make since it implies poor performance. OTOH, SAM and RAGE get mentioned because they are AMD techs and consoles use Zen2 which aren't compatible with them.

There is a good precedent for that view though, in the Shuttle program. It was meant to be cheap because it was reusable, but ended up incredibly expensive, in part because it was reusable. (I don't necessarily agree with that view personally, but I'd say it's certainly not just due to lobbying that that opinion is held)

haha, I'm a muppet Since I managed to delete my own post, tldr version. 6800 is Navi21 with the same memory etc. AMD will only want to sell genuinely defective chips as 6800, if they can. They want to drive the value proposition towards the higher margins. If they have to choose recycling a chip or a 6800 they'll chose the 6800, if they have to choose between a 6800 or a 6800XT+ they'll want to choose the higher margin card. It should be a bit better than a 3070, and if AMD's claims are true brutally murder and dismember its corpse when it comes to memory bandwidth and quantity.

Not really, it's a proprietary implementation/ extension. It still uses the raytracing built in to DX12U/ Vulkan. It's clear that CDPR could have at least implemented console raytracing. That they didn't, along with the massive amounts of nVidia branding, is more than suggestive that the 'problem' is an agreement to use nVidia tech exclusively at launch rather than anything else. As a personal note, this sort of thing is exactly why I would not consider buying an nVidia card. My tolerance for co-opting standards is not high. Note, since it is easy to miss: there is added specialist raytracing hardware on the 6000 series (and one benchmark for the RT elements); "New to the AMD RDNA 2 compute unit is the implementation of a high-performance ray tracing acceleration architecture known as the Ray Accelerator. The Ray Accelerator is specialized hardware that handles the intersection of rays providing an order of magnitude increase in intersection performance compared to a software implementation [..] Measured by AMD engineering labs 8/17/2020 on an AMD RDNA 2 based graphics card, using the Procedural Geometry sample application from Microsoft’s DXR SDK, the AMD RDNA 2 based graphics card gets up to 13.8x speedup (471 FPS) using HW based raytracing vs using the Software DXR fallback layer (34 FPS) at the same clocks. Performance may vary." It's just not physically separate hardware like nVidia's RT/ Tensor cores. They're not going to be using the 'GTX solution' unless deliberately nerfed. As Keyrock said it was mentioned briefly, but is not ready for launch.

I'm not all that up to snuff on the console releases, but a quick search confirms Watch Dogs Legion for example is a 3rd party launch title on both consoles, and has raytracing on both as well. IIRC PS5 has at least 6 launch titles with raytracing enabled.

I think anyone who expected an nVidia branded and funded game- specifically intended to drive RTX sales- to ship with the oppositions' raytracing enabled would be dreaming. (The stated reason for not having it is extremely questionable; fundamentally RTX is just DXR with nVidia branding and other devs have had no problem getting raytracing enabled devkits for the nextbox launch- EA, Ubisoft, Namco Bandai; even Bloodlines 2 with all its problems (and delays meaning it isn't anywhere near ready for the nextbox launch) was meant to have raytracing. They'd certainly have allowed CDPR to do the same, so the issue is 100% to do with CDPR)

Goes live in 15 hours, which is 5am NZ time...

Similar to the Aberfeldy I'd say. It's really smooth, almost no peat or smoke, not very strong on the palate but with a very nice finish. It's the sort of scotch I could very easily imagine being turned into Drambuie.

I thought carving pumpkins were rubbish to eat anyway? We don't get red pumpkin for sale here, it's all Crowns/ Butternut/ Buttercup which aren't the right shape for carving anyway. I thought for a moment I actually had that Scotch on the shelf but it's Aberlour, not Aberfeldy. Same bottle style though.

Here it's an estimated 6-8 weeks from order to receipt for 3080/90, and that's with a hefty additional cost above US MSRP/ currency conversion/ GST depressing demand. I suspect that's actually not bad at all, compared to some places. An analysis of the Ampere launch and what went wrong would be an interesting read. Lots of people blaming Samsung; but ultimately the fault has to lie with nVidia and most likely Jensen Huang himself. Not only because ultimately the TSMC/ Samsung decision was his either, there have also been other questionable decisions.

In that case the first 'person' who told would be CDP themselves though, so they'd still potentially be in trouble. For important announcements it has to be need to know, and while there may well have been suspicions of a delay they were just suspicions. It's also complicated because CDPR does not release many games at all so C2077 is expected to be the main money earner for multiple years. (IIRC CDP has been warned for making announcements improperly before, though I cannot remember what it was in respect of, so take with grain of salt)

Yeah that seems pretty much certain. It's unfortunate for the employees, but if they informed them first and then the stock price dropped early because an employee told someone CDP would be in potential trouble for insider trading.

Synthetics don't mean nothing*, but certainly have to be taken with a large grain of salt. You'd have to question whether a benchmark developed for- essentially- a nVidia branded technology is going to reflect reality or whether it has the RT equivalent of 64x tesselation applied. *The classic example is probably Zen2, where the increased cache completely invalidated some benchmarks because the benchmark would literally run from cache. Radeon 7 was a debadged/ non certified Instinct card, so it did incredibly well at benchmarks that relied on compute- or memory bandwidth since it had 4 stacks of HBM2/ ~1TB of bandwidth.

I'd suspect Jason is most upset about not being able to talk about a leak about a delay from the internal email, then the official announcement when it was made. If you're a large (and for CDPR, ludicrously so for the number of games they release) public company you have to do things a certain way or you get smacked for stock manipulation when news leaks before you make an official announcement.

Gee whiz, my crimes are manifest. I use an analogy to describe something, big deal. If that's all you got, you got nothing. And that's literally all you got. Except, as always, the will to go on and on in the hope the other person will simply give up from boredom. Would Biden or Trump have responded well to a question on "What would you do about Artsakh?" out of the blue. Nah, of course not. Good questions intended to get an informative response always supply the context, because in those cases the desired result is an informative response. Firing unrelated questions out with no context is bad interviewing, at least if the idea is to get an informed response instead of confuse the interviewee. See, I use simile to make a point, you baldly and prosaically rewrite things to what you wish happened. You didn't post that prediction with academic disinterest; you posted it, you actively defended it, and you did so consistently because it's what you wanted to happen- and logic be damned. And that's why the litany of your mistakes gets posted every time, stupid assertion you wish was true, followed by doggedly defending said assertion by any means necessary including simply making stuff up, every time. It's only become 'Gromnir just post interesting article'- that just happens, coincidentally, blind luck of the draw, to fit his neocon wet dream US supremacist foreign policy- as some sort of interesting conversation starter since it became manifestly obvious what a load of old todgers it was. And note, I'm not saying the article was literally a load of wrinkly love sausages, it's another figure of speech. FTR, Russia's foreign reserves are higher now than they were in 2014. Even as an interesting conversation starter the article was utterly utterly worthless, and has been proven so. Lol. I complain about you arguing consistently in bad faith and what are your efforts? Chop context off the end of the Johnson transcript exactly as I complained about; the article you posted and supported defended etc wasn't actually your views- because it's now obviously and conclusively wrong- and me pointing out that the report you used to assert that the US Government Did Nothing Wrong in the lead up to Iraq was nowhere as vindicating as you made out. All you do is prove my point that you're incapable of arguing in good faith and are only really interested in shouting your views as loudly and persistently as possible until the other person gives up. The last part of course puts anyone arguing with you in a bit of a dilemma.

Seriously, do you ever actually read what you post? I complained it was a question with no context after completely unrelated ones (that had context, your transcript showed it) and your own cite shows exactly that. Indeed, with the context added at the end- which you omitted, way to validate my complaints- it's clear that Johnson knew what he was talking about, also as I said. You get the snark first and foremost because you're utterly incapable of arguing anything in even the slightest approximation of good faith. Here's what the equivalent would be now. "Mr Trump/ Biden, what's the difference between you and the other candidate? Which 3rd party candidate is more likely to take votes from you? Do you worry about the Clinton Effect in 2020? What's your view on Artsakh?" ... ??? ... 99% chance neither candidate would give an adequate reply. If you phrased it differently- "what's your view on Nagorno Karabakh? (maybe) or the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan? (definitely)- you'd get a decent answer, if you just throw out 'Artsakh' they're going to be wondering what you mean; some domestic policy acronym, RSAC? artworks being stolen maybe? Art Sacramoni, is he a mafioso related to Johnny Sac' from the Sopranos? unless they've been briefed ludicrously well. That's why, if you're asking in good faith, you say "what's your view on the situation in Syria", or "Aleppo Syria". As your transcript shows they already knew what the general position was, the point was to ask the question in a deliberately unclear way to get a good soundbite, not to get actual information. Johnson is certainly not blameless, better media training or thinking better on his feet would have helped, but questions are asked that way and in that sequence to get a desired result. And that result is not to inform people of what the candidate thinks, otherwise you'd ask the questrion clearly.