Tuesday, February 28th 2017
AMD "Vega" High Bandwidth Cache Controller Improves Minimum and Average FPS
At its Capsaicin & Cream event today, AMD announced that its High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), a feature introduced by its "Vega" GPU architecture to improve memory management, will increase game performance tangibly. The company did a side-by-side comparison between two sessions of "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided," in which a HBCC-aware machine purportedly presented 2x better minimum FPS, and 1.5x better average FPS scores, than a non-HBCC-aware system (though the old, trusty frame-rate counter was conspicuously absent from both demos).
AMD also went on to show how HBCC seemingly halves memory requirements, by deliberately capping the amount of addressable memory on the HBCC-aware system to only 2 GB - half of the 4 GB addressable by the non-HBCC-aware system, while claiming that even so, the HBCC-enabled system still showed "the same or better performance" through its better memory management and bandwidth speeds. If these results do hold up to scrutiny, this should benefit implementations of "Vega" with lower amounts of video memory, while simultaneously reducing production costs and overall end-user pricing, since smaller memory pools would be needed for the same effect.
AMD also went on to show how HBCC seemingly halves memory requirements, by deliberately capping the amount of addressable memory on the HBCC-aware system to only 2 GB - half of the 4 GB addressable by the non-HBCC-aware system, while claiming that even so, the HBCC-enabled system still showed "the same or better performance" through its better memory management and bandwidth speeds. If these results do hold up to scrutiny, this should benefit implementations of "Vega" with lower amounts of video memory, while simultaneously reducing production costs and overall end-user pricing, since smaller memory pools would be needed for the same effect.
44 Comments on AMD "Vega" High Bandwidth Cache Controller Improves Minimum and Average FPS
Having less vram should have less impact on fps ... and incoming news about Vega HBCC to halve memory requirements
I would liken this to when we bought motherboards that had their own cache, the CPU was unaware of the cache other than if it found instructions in it, they were executed much faster than on system memory. I believe their CPU division and engineering of SOC for Sony and MS is paying dividends for GPU tech as well.
Only thing that I wonder about is if HBC can do the data management on its own or if it has to be specifically coded to use it. Because if it can be used out of the box with anything, it'll be awesome. But if you have to specifically code for it, then that's a problem by itself.
From the posts in this thread at the Nvidia school of fanboy!!
First we had people butthurt about all the AMD news since if you have to buy AMD you are obviously a piss poor peon that shouldn't have a computer, and now we have a lot of posts about a new technology from AMD and lots of hate tossed it way by salad tossers, with no syrup.
@Pruny
That's not entirely true. The cards were VRAM starved to begin with, some packing only 32MB of on-board VRAM. And then it was expanded to 128MB which was a common standard in 2004/2005. Meaning the cards could be ridiculously cheap since they hardly had any expensive RAM on them.
speculation at this point but the new nuance from this side seems to be the 'cache' part that hints at new pieces in the hierarchy. looks like amd might be preparing to equip cards with multiple types of memory, perhaps both hbm and gddr5x and the new improved controller will be able to handle this better.
I mean, if this will be fully automatic without any need for special game code, it's gonna be nice and it's going to dramatically expand the usability of the graphic card over time as it ages and new demanding games come out with more memory needed to work. Sure it won't be as fast as having as much VRAm available at all times, but it won't be nearly as bad as running out of VRAM entirely. I know Win8/Win10 already does this to small extent, but I don't think not even nearly in such extent as VEGA will be doing it this.
I mean, with Vega, my 32GB of system RAM will finally find a very good use. Because for games, not even 16GB is really needed. Meaning other 16GB is idling to itself most of the time. But Vega will be able to use that. I like the idea very much.
in context of using ram in addition to vram why would memory management be a more limiting factor over a very narrow pipe?