Last week, AMD hosted its GPU14 Tech Day event, where it detailed upcoming products and technologies relating to its GPU line-up.
Last week, AMD hosted its GPU14 Tech Day event, where it detailed upcoming products and technologies relating to its GPU line-up. The main three things AMD announced were its new GPUs, TrueAudio technology and the low-level Mantle API. The new graphics cards will follow the R9-xxxy and R7-xxxy branding (where ‘x’ is a digit and ‘y’ is an alphabet), marking a departure from the traditional Radeon HD xxxx naming scheme. Out of the “new” cards, only the R9 290 and R9 290X are actually new, and receive an updated version of the GCN architecture, DX11.2 support and the TrueAudio DSP. The 290X looks like a GTX 780 competitor, though rumour has it that it’s faster. The official info from AMD states that the card has 4GB of dedicated video RAM, over 6 billion transistors and an internal memory bandwidth of over 300GB/s across a 512-bit memory bus. They’re also making a big deal about the 5 teraflops of compute performance put out by this card (compare the PS4 for a good laugh). Though you’d also be laughing at the speculated $800 price tag, just not in a happy way. The rest of the line-up basically consists of rebranded HD 7000 series cards at lower price points, with the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition taking the form of the R9-280X, with a US price of $300. Add 30% more to get the approximate price in India. AMD is also taking steps to implement native 4K resolution support, though we’re still a long way off from when that matters. Same goes for DirectX 11.2, I believe no game currently uses it and I really doubt that we’ll say wide adoption any time soon. The next major announcement was TrueAudio. Basically, the GPU will integrate an audio DSP for hardware acceleration, similar to what a dedicated soundcard does. Usually, audio processing is handled by the CPU on most computers, unless a soundcard is installed. TrueAudio, in theory, would enable developers to implement much higher quality sound and substantially improve fancy things like 3D positional audio. Note that this isn’t the same as Nvidia’s HD Audio feature that appears to be a software feature and not a hardware one, and simply allows audio to be re-routed through an HDMI cable if connected. TrueAudio would act as a general purpose sound processor, and co-exist with whatever drives your audio currently. The third major announcement is the Mantle API which will allow developers to bypass abstraction layers like DirectX and OpenGL and access hardware more directly. AMD claims it will increase the frequency of draw calls to the GPU by as much as 9 times, though that won’t mean a 9x increase in performance, though it should be measurable. This move makes sense for AMD, given that both the PS4 and the Xbone both employ GCN based AMD GPUs. However, there is a very real concern that it will cause segmentation among games and developers, as it potentially locks out Nvidia and Intel GPUs from using the technology. Many are comparing this to the Glide API used back in the 90s with 3dfx’s Voodoo graphics cards. Glide was the very reason that OpenGL and DirectX took off, abstraction layers made it easy for everyone to get things to work. AMD has stated that they will open up the API’s code in a year or so, though the usefulness to Intel or Nvidia is questionable. The first game to use the API will be Battlefield 4, which is out in November, so we should be able to see what the fuss is about pretty soon.
