Radeon Thread

[Keyrock]

Tomorrow (noon EST) is the Radeon announcement. After that, I should know the final piece of my new rig, one way or the other.

Give me the good news, Lisa Su.

[Keyrock]

Tomorrow (noon EST) is the Radeon announcement and we can put at least some of the 8 billion rumors to rest. After that, I should know the final piece of my new rig, one way or the other.

Give me the good news, Lisa Su.

Edited October 27, 2020 by Keyrock

[Zoraptor]

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

[Azdeus]

https://www.gfinityesports.com/article/7475/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-nvidia-amd-hardware-gpu-cd-projekt-red-xbox-ps4-pc

For those that care about such things.

At launch there won't be ray tracing on consoles or AMD gpus.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that AMD gpus likely won't have ray tracing in older titles until that is fixed either.

[Zoraptor]

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)

[Azdeus]

5 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

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)

Are those games confirmed to have ray tracing at launch though?

[Zoraptor]

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.

[AwesomeOcelot]

RTX is a fundamentally different implementation of ray tracing. Nvidia has contributed to DXR, it's the same situation as AMD with mantle that led to DX12/Vulkan. Console ray tracing teased so far has been a limited implementation that you might expect from a GPU without specific ray tracing cores.

PC games are not going to have a RTX implementation of ray tracing and then a AMD implementation. They're going to have RTX and GTX implementation. The GTX might have cheated ray tracing, like the new console games, or the crysis remaster, they might not, but they are not going to have a RTX equivalent.

I'd like to be wrong, means AMD are far more in the game than people think. AMD are perfectly capable of leading the industry with technology, having something cooking secretly, but I can't see it this generation.

[Bokishi]

6900XT beating the 3090 in most games...

Is this the year I go red??

Edited October 28, 2020 by Bokishi

[Keyrock]

Turns out the Infiniy Cache rumors were true. 128 MB of cache is, quite frankly, ludicrous, but it's real. 

The 6800XT sounds great...

...

Must resist urge to buy 6900XT...

Must resist...

Edited October 28, 2020 by Keyrock

[AwesomeOcelot]

1 minute ago, Bokishi said:

6900XT beating the 3090 in most games...

I doubt that's with RT on... Also 3090 is a terrible gaming card, no one should have bought it for gaming.

6800XT is a 3080 priced card with 3070 performance.

6800 is priced above the 3070 for sub 3070 performance.

This was embarassing, but not unexpected, as Radeon has been in this state for a long time.

[ComradeYellow]

Yeah I'm impressed with its rasterization and overall efficiency, they've come a long way, but their Ray Tracing bit left much to be desired, and no DLSS equivalent?  I might have missed that part.

Both the 6800XT and 3080 are well within the variation of each other and not enough difference to make a difference, 144+fps 1440p should be a breeze with either, but Nvidia's bag of tricks are more to my taste than AMD's.

Each card is a great option though, it just boils down to preference and sports team fandom at this point.

[Humanoid]

Interesting and all that, but my playground will probably be in the 6700/XT vs 3060/Ti battle. Said before that I'm okay with stretching to ~50% more than I've ever paid for a video card before, and while that's negotiable to an extent, every single option from both vendors is over +100% of that price.

Doesn't help that the local RRP for the 3070 was inflated in relative terms: in the US, a 3070, Xbox SeX, and PS5 are all the same price, yet the 3070 lands at $60 more than the consoles here.

Edited October 28, 2020 by Humanoid

[Humanoid]

Double post

Edited October 28, 2020 by Humanoid

[Keyrock]

I'm sure the benchmarks shown were genuine, but also sans ray tracing. If I cared about ray tracing then I would lean toward Nvidia. Given that I don't care about ray tracing then AMD seems the better option for me, given that the 6800XT is $50 cheaper than the RTX3080. The temptation to splurge for the 6900XT is strong, though...

[Sarex]

No DLSS is a bigger deal than no RTX to be honest.

[Keyrock]

14 minutes ago, Sarex said:

No DLSS is a bigger deal than no RTX to be honest.

AMD is working on it and it's going to come in a future update. I forget what they called it, not DLSS, obviously, given that's a Nvidia proprietary technology. As to when AMD's implementation of upsampling will come and how it will stack up against DLSS. 

Edit: I think AMD calls its upsampling solution "Super Resolution".

Edited October 28, 2020 by Keyrock

[Sarex]

This is where I like the saying from Marques Brownlee, "buy the product for what it offers, not for what it promises to offer in the future," or something close to that.

Edited October 28, 2020 by Sarex

[Keyrock]

My favorite new marketing buzz word from AMD is 

RAGE MODE

[Humanoid]

I want All-in-Wonder mode.

[Keyrock]

Just now, Humanoid said:

I want All-in-Wonder mode.

That brings back memories.

[AwesomeOcelot]

"I don't care about RT" is a very weird stance. Sure, you may not play games that have RT implementations, and that probably is a lot of people, but then the intersection of those people and people that will spend more than $400 on a GPU is not many. It's like being in the 90's and saying I don't care about glide, or I don't care about hardware T&L. Some people probably didn't, as they were playing sprite based RTS, but then they probably weren't interested in GPUs in general.

GN Steve reported from AMD that these GPU won't support RTX games without a rewrite. I'm not even sure there's going to be meaningful RT games for AMD this generation. My impression from what he was saying was that AMD does not have a DLSS equivalent. Perhaps AMD features will be good, like their super sampling, dynamic resolution, sharpening etc... we'll have to wait and see.

My first ATI card was a Rage Fury. It was an angry GPU.

[ComradeYellow]

4k 100+ fps alone could be a good reason (with some settings tweaks) to pay top dollar for a GPU.  I just prefer smaller screens with scientifically perfect resolution, high fps, and all the latest cool gpu features to go with it.

[Keyrock]

The pricing on the 6800 seems the weirdest thing here. The 6800XT seems roughly on par with a RTX3080, in rasterization, at least, and undercuts the price by $50, this is a perfectly reasonable move from AMD. The 6900XT is roughly on par with a RTX3090 in gaming, though it has 8 GB of memory less, which is a big deal for content creation, which is really what those cards are meant for. Still, the 6900XT WAY cheaper, so again, this is a reasonable move from AMD. The 6800 just seems like a piss poor value, though. They measured it against the RTX2080Ti because the RTX3070 isn't technically available yet and I'm pretty certain Nvidia didn't send one to AMD for review, still the RTX2080Ti and RTX3070 have roughly the same performance in independent benchmarks, so the RTX2080Ti is a good enough proxy for the RTX3070 for the benchmarks. So the 6800 seems to be on par with a 3070, maybe slightly faster (rasterization), but it's $80 more expensive than a RTX3070 and also only $70 cheaper than the 6800XT. This is baffling pricing from AMD.

The 6800XT is clearly the best value of the 3 cards here. The 6900XT isn't nearly as ludicrously overpriced as the RTX3090, but it's still a 35% price hike over the 6800XT for very likely less than 10% more performance. Still, it's top of the line card and those are ALWAYS overpriced, so it's not surprising. The 6800 pricing just doesn't make sense. Why would anyone buy this over the RTX3070?

[Zoraptor]

3 hours ago, AwesomeOcelot said:

RTX is a fundamentally different implementation of ray tracing.

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.

2 hours ago, AwesomeOcelot said:

My impression from what he was saying was that AMD does not have a DLSS equivalent.

As Keyrock said it was mentioned briefly, but is not ready for launch.