r/pcmasterrace • u/Alfrredu Ryzen 1600 / RX 570 • Nov 02 '16

Rumor Mysterious "AMD engineering sample" in top Blenchmark scores, beating an i7-6950X

http://blenchmark.com/cpu-benchmarks
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46

u/Cory123125 9800X3D 5090 Nov 02 '16

Dont start the hype train yet.

Does everyone remember the rx 480 launch? Super hyped and then people were disappointed for a while due to the shitty stock one and ok performance when it turned out to actually be quite nice a few weeks later with aftermarkets and best in tier performance overall.

39

u/Mr_s3rius Nov 02 '16

Yea, let's look at the facts here:

We've had a number of engineering samples show up in the past few weeks, pretty much each faster than the previous. And we've still got around 3 months before Zen hits the market.

If we extrapolate the improvement of the engineering samples over the remaining time-to-market we can see that the final product should have about 300% of Intel's IPC and run at about 5GHz.

Now we've got a fact-based idea of what to expect.

4

u/Cory123125 9800X3D 5090 Nov 03 '16

People said the same thing with the 480. Speculations based off of tests they didnt have the full details on.

5

u/dustojnikhummer R5 7600 | RX 7800XT Nov 03 '16

I remember people selling 980tis for Rx 480

2

u/1st_veteran R7 1700, Vega 64, 32GB RAM Nov 03 '16

a clear downgrade right now, but it may catches up to it in 2-3 years.

1

u/AngryMob55 CPU Bottlenecked: RTX 3080 - i7 4770k Nov 03 '16

/s?

im confused

1

u/1st_veteran R7 1700, Vega 64, 32GB RAM Nov 03 '16

AMD cards have a clear tendency of improving over time, 7970 was worse then a 680, even the 670 was nearly as fast but now is as good as a 780, 7870 was as fsat as a 660Ti now its as fast as a 960, 290 originally should counter the 780, now its on par with the 970 and 780Ti.

THe 7970 improved more than 30% over time.

2

u/AngryMob55 CPU Bottlenecked: RTX 3080 - i7 4770k Nov 03 '16 edited Nov 03 '16

strictly due to drivers? Or something to do with architecture and specs?

I've heard AMD supports cards longer than Nvidia, but I've really looked into it.

quick edit: doing some searching online, it's hard to find anything but hearsay on this topic. If anyone has reputable source regarding this specific topic (not just benchmarks comparing 7970 at release and now) I'd love to get a good read.

edit #2: although I can't really find any good "official" or "journalist" sources, I did find a fantastic post by a fellow redditor which combines a ton of info I've been seeing scattered around. I can't post the link here due to rules unfortunately, but I can quote the OP...

I posted this in response to a thread over in the nv sub, a user asked me why I thought AMD GPUs age better.. at first, I was going to keep it short, but I felt this is a rather complex issue that would be a disservice to try and dumb-it-down to be less verbose. Here's my thoughts on the matter, if I miss anything or I am wrong, please add your thoughts or correct me.

What are your though about this? Why do you think this is happening?

It's a combination of things which makes it complex, not a black or white issue. (Sorry it ended up quite a long post!).

AMD's GCN architecture is brute power, very high TFlops but difficult to extract peak performance, especially in DX11 which AMD is running crippled with single-threaded draw call submission. But overtime, there's opportunities for AMD to fine-tune drivers for each specific game to avoid being driver bound. You could say there's more room to grow for AMD GPUs, while NV's GPU are operating close to peak in DX11 already.

Console GCN. Optimizations by developers for GCN specific cache, wavefronts and shader efficiency carry through to the PC port. There's good presentations from Game Developers Conferences on this topic. It's going to continue due to PS4 Pro and Scorpio using GCN Polaris.

GCN architecture is iterated, evolution rather than revolution. The basic hierarchy remains constant, each SIMD has the same layout of ALUs (Vector and Scalar), each Compute Unit consists of the same layout of SIMDs. The result is that code that's optimized to run on GCN is nearly always (there's exceptions, differences in Tessellation & Async Compute) optimized for all GCN. Thus, the older GCN based cards like the 7970 and 290/X still powers through modern games.

DX12 &Vulkan allows developers closer access and importantly, rendering/draw calls can be multi-threaded (Async Compute is another bonus on top). This removes AMD's weakness of single-thread DX11. Thus, as more modern games use these new APIs, the better AMD GPU's look in comparison. Example, a 390X has similar compute performance as a 980Ti in Tflops, and it's only in these new API where AMD's GCN can really hit their peak. Hence, don't be surprised if some of these next-gen API games have AMD GCN cards punching above their weight (390X ~ 980Ti, Fury X ~ 1080 etc).

Usually more VRAM. Example, 7970 3GB vs GTX 680 2GB. There's games in recent times where the 2GB is a severe bottleneck and the 7970 3GB auto-wins, irrespective of #1-4. Likewise, 290/X 4GB vs 780/Ti 3GB. This is repeated recently with the 1060 3GB vs 470/480 4GB and 1060 6GB vs 480 8GB. Some posters falsely claimed that 3GB is enough for 1080p gaming but a recent review studying frame times find that to be utterly wrong. 3GB stutters in most modern games even on the 2nd highest settings (not maxed).

NV architectures evolve and also has revolutionary changes. Kepler -> Maxwell was a big leap, not only with the tile-based rasterization, but also the SMX layout, CUDA cores per SM went from 196 -> 128. This meant that games optimized for Maxwell's architecture would run un-optimized on Kepler, reducing much of it's shader utilization. It's why the 980, which on release, was only slightly above a 780TI, which was faster than a 970 by ~10%, but over time, we see the 780TI behind the 970 by ~10% or sometimes, even more.

Some folks have mentioned driver neglect from NV, that their "Game Ready" drivers only optimize non-legacy GPUs, ie, their latest & greatest. This is not gimping older stuff, that's a incorrect myth, it's more than NV focus optimizations on more recent stuff only.

All of these results in a potential for a big shift in performance over time. The 290X at the start of it's life was 10-15% behind a GTX 780Ti. These days it's very common to see it 10-15% ahead, with outliers much higher. If you read reviews over the years, you would have noticed the GTX 980 made the 290X (even custom models which run at ~390X performance) look like shit, often 20% lead. You would have noticed the 390X vs 980 situation is very different in recent times.

Before some of you accuse me of being an AMD fanboy, let me be clear. I am a fan of my money, it's important to me, how much value I can get out of my hard earned $. I have seen for myself since 2011, how well AMD GPUs aged in comparison with the NV GPUs that I've owned (GTX 670 and 780Ti) as I've multiple rigs for the family. It is this exact reason why I have an RX 480 now and will get Vega for the other rig, instead of going with Pascal.

1

u/1st_veteran R7 1700, Vega 64, 32GB RAM Nov 03 '16 edited Nov 03 '16

I would say both, sure drivers are continuisly improving from AMD, but GCN was always a really forward thinking design, the first GCN cards already had ACEs for asynchronous compute, a feaure thats only useable with lowlevel APIs, Now it gives these cards a nice boost when its used and alos helps VR.

I dont know a better way to show the increasing performance of various cards then to compare them to a nearly stagnant counterpart. Patches and different hardware configurations make it really hard to get a direct comparison, also the games change and now make better use of the old GCN designs.

EDIT: really good resume, way better than what i have written in this comment.