Sizzling Sequels & Fijian Ferocity
admin | June 13th, 2015 - 2:51 pmHow many PlayStation phobics who covet a device of equal proportions will endeavour to forge a “Box” of their “Sweetest” and “Steamiest” fantasies around seven sensational inches of scintillating graphical bravura. And for fools who still doubt that small can be deadly, regard the R9 Nano and drool.
Swifter than a 290, half the length and twice as frugal on fuel. An irresistible opportunity for inspired OEMs to breed armies of savage super NUCs to liberate bedrooms and lounges hitherto subjected to years of tortuous tyranny beneath console communism’s steely sky. These cards aren’t merely cards, they’re our saviours, They’ll immortalize PCs, bring an end to insufferable ports ruined by idle programmers, preserve the honourable art of bespoke builds and prevent the hardware hoarder’s tragic descent into redundancy.
Nvidia-Ite. A compelling and nauseating eulogy that almost had me convinced, save for one colossal spanner in the pipelines.
AMD-ite. Your lack of imagination?
Nvidia-Ite. No, your lack of observation. AMD evidently doesn’t share your radicalism, no HDMI 2 I’m afraid, only 1.4, I hardly need remind you out that means a nice fat cap of 30hz on televisions that don’t have display ports which, last time I checked, was approximately all of them! Isn’t that wonderful? A graphics card twice as pricey as a PS4 with over three times the pixel prowess, but deprived of the ability to showcase it in the same environment, bang goes your PC revolution.
AMD-ite – Well, with displayport 1.2a and Freesync, perhaps HDMI’s days are numbered. It can’t be long before we start seeing an influx of DP TVs
Nvidia-Ite. Ha! So we just invest on the off chance? Which one of us should count the minutes?
AMD-ite – They’ll be adapters this summer.
Nvidia-Ite At $80 each and manufactured by Startech no doubt. A company that compensates for the clumsy oversights of others and a life saving remedy for abandoned consumers. All those poor little Nano’s foundering at sea, cast adrift by their callous crimson mother ship. “Help us.” They howl in desperation as salty waves swell around their capacitors. “We were promised sanctuary in cosy living rooms not a dark and icy death. Those consoles were supposed to be the outcasts, not us. Heaven help us, please, save us. Hark! For I hear a distant hum. Look! Do you see that, on the horizon, can it be? Are we to be saved? Yes! Hooray! The Super Startech lifeboat has rescued our rasterisers.
AMD-ite – If only they made an adaptor to convert your flaky fables into common sense.
Nvidia-Ite – Or to adapt your arguments with intelligence and subtlety .
AMD-ite – Maybe AMD will bundle them.
Nvidia-Ite Maybe pigs will fly. Maybe a 4 gig frame buffer really is enough.
AMD-ite – Either there are no bounds to your stupidity or scaremongering just became an Olympic sport.
Nvidia-Ite – Not at all. I was merely pointing out that while piling fancy RAM high may sell fast at ultra HD, 4 gigs was last year’s minimum. If you’re a sucker for slideshows, you’re in for a treat.
AMD-ite The memory wall is a limitation that AMD were mindful of from the get go and elected to suffer in their quest for speed. Had they opted for GDDR5, we’d have all been bored to death by you squawking over every milliamp per byte the Fiji expended.
The principal objectives of HBM are peerless bandwidth, a reduced form factor and minimal power consumption, while all three are accomplished by moving the chips closer to the GPU and assembling them in stacks. For this initial implementation, each die has a capacity of 2 gigabits, each stack is constrained to a height of four dies and a total of four stacks can be arranged around the GPU. 8 gigabits per stack, one gigabyte in a gigabit hence, an overall tally of 4 gigabytes.
Nvidia-Ite – Fascinating. I had assumed they just thought stacks looked prettier and my utmost gratitude for teaching me to add up. My point however remains. Shadow of Mordor, Crysis 3, Dying Light, Skyrim stuffed with texture packs. With optical opulence at its sweetest, all of these games and others are apt to gobble up 4 gigs faster than a blue whale engulfs 4 tonnes of krill , even at 1080p. What happens at 4k and with multi screen configs? Sorry, but a Titan X is the only way to ensure a secure, stutter free future.
AMD-ite – Please! The Hawaii’s signature was Ultra HD. A 290x traded frames with a Titan despite a 2 gig deficit and regardless of eye candy. Think of it this way, in business throwing money in ever increasing quantities at a problem rarely alleviates it, success is ultimately governed by distribution. Likewise, with many technical obstacles, the solution lies not in the numbers, but how effectively they’re deployed. When you consider that every single megabyte on the Fury XT is effectively served by a stream processor and a one bit bus, you’ll begin to comprehend the scale of AMD’s feat and appreciate how it will debunk the illusion that greater equals better
Nvidia-Ite – Think you’ll find the Maxwell massacred that myth a while ago. Slimmer bus than the Kepler, fewer transistors, smaller die, less cuda cores, trimmed texture units, a lower TDP and yet, 10% nippier.
AMD-ite – Correct, but you forgot the most important deficit, 4 gigs to the Titan Black’s 6, never troubled the 980 did it? Yet here you are declaring it won’t suffice for the Fiji. Perhaps it’s time I withdrew and let you wrap up this debate alone, who knows, you may surprise yourself and win.
Nvidia-Ite – Months have passed since then, in the Steam community that’s an ice age. If four gigs can still cut it, why slap 12 on the Titan X?
AMD-ite – To nourish a profitable fairy tail at the Fiji’s expense. In light of dumping double precision it was their only option.
Nvidia-Ite – Are you serious? Take another look at that table. If your beloved ruler is so confident of his ground breaking design, then why the need for a yet another shambolic re-brand? The 390 and 390x both have Hawaii GPUs, so what the hell is a Granada? Is he pretending these chips are brand new? You know people are convinced they’re Tonga re-spins with GCN 1.2 architecture? At least with the 280 he had the decency to keep the Tahiti name. More significantly, why double up on the RAM, if four gigs is genuinely enough.
AMD-ite – Don’t know how anyone could conclude the 390s were gen three GCN. The 380 has been public knowledge for weeks. That’s the Tonga paraphrase, it follows the 285 and m295X.
Nvidia-Ite – Ah yes, the m295X. A mobile top dog with such promise and so warmly welcomed by entranced Appalachians…until it scorched a granny smith sized hole in their golden delicious displays.
AMD-ite – You really are a Cox. As for the heftier Hawaii’s, it’s devilishly astute marketing when you acknowledge their leaner prices. I love it. Re-branding without an attractive bonus would be illogical. As things stand now, how many of your seething comrades who willingly parted with over $400 to acquire their shiny new 4, sorry, 3.5 gigabyte GTX 970s will be tempted to snatch an octogig 390 and flee the verdant valley once and for all?
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