Friday, September 4th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
Are we sourgraping? You tell us. We're one of the few sites that give you noise testing by some really expensive and broad-ranged noise-testing equipment, and more importantly, card-only power-draw. Our reviews also grill graphics cards through 22 real-world tests across four resolutions, each, and offer price-performance graphs. When NVIDIA didn't send us a GeForce GTX TITAN-Z sample, we didn't care. We didn't make an announcement like this. At $2,999, it was just a terrible product and we never wished it was part of our graphs. Its competing R9 295X2 could be had under $700, and so it continues to top our performance charts.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
759 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
If PhysX was put as a standard in DX12, AMD fans would gone ape crap over it. AMD would also be whining up a storm over it.
Goodbye.
Love that ignore feature. Wish it was pre-emptive though - I'm sure that's Sony or his embryonic twin.
You expect this site to benchmark an alpha build based on a discussion at another site - who also didn't benchmark AofS ?
If you are pining for that discussion, feel free to go to OCN and close the door on the way out.That sounds exactly what a kid in the preoperational stage of cognitive development would say. Once you get older, you'll probably realize that there are adults who understand children (or "know kids" as you term it) - parents, teachers, care givers, psychologists etc. Something to look forward to!
I did see a pretty scathing article on Guru regarding Nvidia's DX12 claims...and sidestepping questions at TechEd conference.
Actually come to think of it a similar article got published after the GTX970 3.5GB fiasco.
Nvidia finally made a statement and released it through PcPer, When Hilbert found out he was super pissed because they had snubbed Guru.
In his view Nvidia were trying to avoid PR damage by releasing statements through cherry picked sites. I guess I'm saying he felt PcPer was sympathetic to Nvidia.
Tbh the whole affair was way way overblown in my view.
For the guy asking about Ashes of Singularity, (Ampere) come back when DX12 games are available.
Benchmarking an API no games even support is benching for the sake of benching.....which smells a bit like hype.
Reminds me of the 3DMark drawcall BS that was flying around the web a while ago.
Who really cares about benchmarks anyway?
1) Where's your benchmark showing DX13 compatibility?
2) Where's you benchmark showing Black Ops 4?
3) Where's your benchmark showing 16k resolution?
Asking for what may eventually be viable, but is currently not testable, is foolish. As yet, DX12 is a largely unexplored and even more largely a software driven pursuit.
I'm literally finding nothing that links async shaders to DirectX 12. It's all DirectCompute which was launched with DirectX 11 so, in theory, all you need is a DirectX 11 card.
To me AMD killed the Nano when they decided to price it at $649, but limiting the number of cards available for review? Just wow AMD :shadedshu: 2015 will probably be remembered as one of the worst years in terms of PR management for the company :(
On a side note, like many others have stated, it wasn't until I realized I had a few trolls on my ignore list that the thread started making more sense, thank goodness for that! LMAO! :laugh:
This quite clear the situation with the new AMD DX12., nvidia does not look good that would be emulating the Async computer (shaders asynchronous), and is becoming more obvious that DirectX 12 is based on Mantle and hence the advantage of having asynchronous hardware shaders, NVIDIA also provided two new effects the raster order Rasterization conservative views and that these two effects are what make the extra support to generate the DirectX 12.1, but this does not actually add much if we do remenber the words of NVIDIA said in previous versions of DirecX that decial something like We are not interested in implementing the partial revisions why this dont add nothing important. So it was for this reason that NVIDIA was only DX10 and DX11 only then, but at the last moment also use DX11.1, but in short what matters in DirectX is the main features and that these are for hardware support.
All DX11 cards support the instructions for async shaders; AMD is the only the manufacturer that took the time to make it work as Microsoft intended (asynchronously).
So of course you and the rest of Sunnyvale cheerleaders launch into async shader implemantation (we have threads for that already), the GTX 970 is-it-4GB-or-not-quite (we have about 6 threads for that already), and crying that an unreleased game at alpha isn't the focus on the site - but also has it's own threads.
You guys don't want to blow your entire wad prematurely on thread derailing content before the big reveal, you'll have nothing left for when the reviews go live and the inevitable questions of availability.
420 comments... you could say its blazin