2016+ CPU/GPU News

[revelator]

one thing i been wondering about is why noone started using the old guillemot / hercules rendering engine (3D prophet also known as the kyro series). It had the benefit of handling detail that you usually needed a far more beefy card for (driver issues not withstanding) by only rendering the portion of the scene in the viewport and not like any other gfx card in a 360" view, saving a lot of GPU gruntwork.

this also ment the card could get away with a somewhat smaller cooler

[revelator]

well what do you know nvidia actually used powervr's tiling engine in the maxwell and pascal lineup and many smartphones today use it as well.

[nbohr1more]

On 8/30/2024 at 9:30 PM, revelator said:

well what do you know nvidia actually used powervr's tiling engine in the maxwell and pascal lineup and many smartphones today use it as well.

wow!

I heard that they had their own tiling \ tbdr tech from their 3Dfx acquisition.

I'm still shocked that AMD made it's tiling tech require engine coders to request the behavior. Maybe RDNA4 will finally fix that.

[revelator]

Yeah was a bit of a shocker when i discovered it. But in retrospect i think that was the main reason for nvidia to aquire both firms tech as the tiling engine cuts out a huge gpu hog.

[revelator]

STB was povervr and 3dfx collaborated with them to create the voodoo cards, when nvidia aquired 3dfx they also aquired some of STB's tech for one the tiling engine, from 3dfx itself mostly there antialiasing tech and SLI allthough nvidias differs somewhat from that used on the voodoo cards.

It goes to show how much muscle is required to render modern games that gfx cards need to use such tech to alleviate the strain on the GPU and even then we still need DLSS or FSR for the more heavy titles .

[revelator]

as for AMD they are in a bit of a bind with said tech as they are basically forced to reinvent the wheel, might turn out good might turn out a bust only time will tell.

[revelator]

Hmm looks like the upcoming FSR 4.0 will be AI powered, FSR 1.0 used spatial upscaling while 2.0 and 3.0 used temporal while 3.0 also added frame generation to the table. Speculation seems to point at it using the native DXR features which will mean any card capable of using DX12PRO will support it (if that statement holds water only time will tell).

[jaxa]

10 hours ago, revelator said:

Hmm looks like the upcoming FSR 4.0 will be AI powered, FSR 1.0 used spatial upscaling while 2.0 and 3.0 used temporal while 3.0 also added frame generation to the table. Speculation seems to point at it using the native DXR features which will mean any card capable of using DX12PRO will support it (if that statement holds water only time will tell).

I hadn't heard the latter speculation.

All details are very much in the air. I imagine they will time the release for RDNA4, but we'll have to see if they allow it to run on older gens, APUs, or even XDNA NPUs. There's talk of a mobile focus so I wouldn't be surprised if it was optimized to use XDNA2 (~50 TOPS) out of the gate.

[revelator]

yeah for the most part it seems this was intended for steamdecks / mobile etc. though it would be odd indeed if they only developed it for the mobile segment . the 7000 series alledgedly has something like nvidias tensor cores on chip but they are unused atm. otherwise id suspect a lot of angry AMD users.

[revelator]

also looks like it will be used for frame generation albeit atm it seems framegen works just fine on older nvidia cards if using FSR 3 it might lead to even better results .

starfield runs quite fine with it for one, even on high with the 3070 in 3440x1440 (ultrawide).

[jaxa]

7 hours ago, revelator said:

yeah for the most part it seems this was intended for steamdecks / mobile etc. though it would be odd indeed if they only developed it for the mobile segment . the 7000 series alledgedly has something like nvidias tensor cores on chip but they are unused atm. otherwise id suspect a lot of angry AMD users.

The way I see it, if the goal is to match DLSS on upscaling very low resolution to 1080p without looking like total crap, then the major beneficiary will be the handhelds. The older FSRs are better when you already have a relatively high input resolution.

[revelator]

Hmm you could be right  its not actually that far of even now though dlss still wins on performance, the gap has shortened somewhat. With hardware support it might even be a serious contender.

[revelator]

one thing dx12pro had going for it was mesh shaders (alan wake2) even though it was actually created to cut out a good deal of the shader chain alan wake 2 might be a poor example as for the performance gains as that game instead opted to instead make it as gorgeous as humanely possible. hell even a 4090 can barely hit 60 fps with everything cranked up to 11 in it. in the following years i guess most of the performance gains will be software based.

AMD for one seems to be going that route now branding itself as a software company 1st and a hardware producer 2nd.

[revelator]

minor edit it was called dx12 ultimate.

mesh shaders are also possible with vulkan (all cards that support vulkan 1.85 ?) and in opengl but so far only for nvidia cards (turing and up), AMD should have the opengl version shortly if i hear right.

[revelator]

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMD-Gfx-Drivers/issues/4

[jaxa]

Raspberry Pi 5 running Doom 3 at 4K 60 Hz... with an external GPU:

 

[revelator]

impressive i long pondered getting one for my tv for streaming and some light gaming.

[taffernicus]

On 10/18/2024 at 6:39 AM, jaxa said:

Raspberry Pi 5 running Doom 3 at 4K 60 Hz... with an external GPU:

 

Excellent gaming performance for credit-card sized Single Board Computer. RPI3 to RPi5 is a big jump

I just realized that raspbian was rebranded to raspberry pi os as of 2020

[taffernicus]

I wonder how it performs with current cheap radeon rx card like rx6400/7400

 

Now RPi3 looks so underpowered lol. I still have one lying around. Either I want to use it to run a bind9/dnsmasq server, adsb feeder(poor adsbexchange coverage is my motivation) or retropie

 

I used it to emulate unixv6 last time (to figure out the internals of that OS)

Edited October 19, 2024 by taffernicus

[taffernicus]

i really miss out the update of intel gpu, particularly intel arc product line. There are so many comments that mention intel arc. Is the intel arc driver still unstable? Game compatibility issues, GPU tuning software ,idle power consumption issue, driver issues and linux support seem to be intel arc's main problem.

I once lost hope with intel GPU and i have had a bad experience with it LOL. At the beginning of the release of intel GT3(intel GT3 head to head with GT650m lol. That news came around in 2013-'14 i think. At the same time, my friend gave a review of him using radeon 7870xt crossfire and fx8350. It keeps motivating me to stay away from integrated gpu. I was also still a hardcore nvidia fan at that time) I was happy of the improvement but the next line looks mediocre. Then came next gen intel iris which seemed promising. Intel is starting to shine now in dedicated GPU field.

 

Edited October 19, 2024 by taffernicus

[jaxa]

10 hours ago, taffernicus said:

I wonder how it performs with current cheap radeon rx card like rx6400/7400

 

If you watch the video, he picked the Polaris-based RX 460 because they're new enough to use the open source driver, but old enough to be well supported.

There is no such card as the RX 7400 for ordinary desktop users, but if AMD made one based on the Navi 33 die, it could theoretically be pretty good. It could end up being similar to the mobile Radeon RX 7600S, or the workstation Radeon Pro W7500, both of which use around 70-75 Watts. There have been rumors that they will do this, but we are already nearing the release of RDNA4 GPUs. On the other hand, Nvidia released the comparable RTX 3050 6GB in February 2024, after the launch of every RTX 4000 and 4000 Super card.

[taffernicus]

16 hours ago, jaxa said:

If you watch the video, he picked the Polaris-based RX 460 because they're new enough to use the open source driver, but old enough to be well supported.

There is no such card as the RX 7400 for ordinary desktop users, but if AMD made one based on the Navi 33 die, it could theoretically be pretty good. It could end up being similar to the mobile Radeon RX 7600S, or the workstation Radeon Pro W7500, both of which use around 70-75 Watts. There have been rumors that they will do this, but we are already nearing the release of RDNA4 GPUs. On the other hand, Nvidia released the comparable RTX 3050 6GB in February 2024, after the launch of every RTX 4000 and 4000 Super card.

ooh i have found the explanation of rx460 on jeff geerling's blog post as well

tbf i am quite confused with current AMD graphic cards naming , hirearchy and numbering especially entry level series. They even offer low-end OEM cards like 53xx / 63xx. My knowledge of AMD graphic card lineup is still stuck in RDNA1 / 1st gen AMD NAVI lol. Nvidia is quite consistent with xx50/xx60/xx70 format. Thank you for elaborating that.

[revelator]

yeah the number scheme jumped somewhat after the polaris models eg. vega 56 etc. then onto the 5000 series for the navi models, but has been more consistent since then with the 6000 models taking over and then the 7000 series.

polaris was probably the first series who could contend with the old R9 series while using less ressources (the R9 series were power hogs with the 390X sucking upwards of 500 watts) in 4k the R9 series still held its own but like polaris it really did not have the muscle for upcomming game titles.

[revelator]

i wonder raspian could probably get away with an onboard vega chip cooling might be problematic though.

also im not sure if any of amd's chips with vega gfx are arm based ?.

[revelator]

after some digging it seems they are working on an arm based apu named soundwave but it is scheduled for release in 2026 so not just around the corner.

leaks say it will use rdna 3.5 gfx but details are sparse.

hmm the coolipi alu case might actually be able to handle the cooling reqs, it goes as the best cooled raspian case avaliable from tests, all depends on how much heat the gfx section on the apu spits out. but since the soundwave is geared towards the mobile market  i suspect it might be able to keep it cool enough.