Tuesday, June 9th 2015
AMD Radeon Graphics Roadmap for 2015 Leaked
It looks like AMD's desktop discrete GPU lineup for 2015 will see a mix of rebrands, re-codename, and one big new chip, all making up the new Radeon R7 300 and R9 300 series. Cards based in this lineup should begin rolling out this month. Leaks from OEMs such as this one, suggest that the first of these should begin rolling out as early as June 16.
The spread is pretty cut and dry. "Hawaii," the chip driving the R9 290 series, will not only get a new codename as "Grenada," but also a seamless rebrand to the R9 390 series, with Grenada Pro making up the R9 390, and Grenada XT making up the R9 390X. One possibility could be AMD taking advantage of low 4 Gbit GDDR5 chip prices to cram 8 GB of standard memory amount, across Grenada's 512-bit wide memory interface. The R9 390X will compete with the GeForce GTX 970, while the R9 390 will offer an option in the vast price and performance gorge between the GTX 960 and GTX 970.
The R9 280 series, has been a messy affair, with two chips, "Tahiti" (re-branded from the HD 7900 series, which dates back to 2012); and the newer "Tonga" silicon, which has similar specs to Tahiti, but a more modern Graphics CoreNext 1.2 stream processor implementation, which offers bare-metal support for Direct3D feature-level 12_0. This chip will get a fresh codename as "Antigua," and will drive a single SKU, the R9 380. The R9 380 could feature 4 GB of standard memory amount (either 4 GB using eight chips is cheaper than 3 GB using twelve chips, or 3 GB is a hard-sell). The R9 380 will compete with the GTX 960.
The "x70" moniker will get demoted from the Radeon R9 series, down to Radeon R7. There will be just one SKU, the Radeon R7 270, and it will be driven by the "Trinidad" silicon, which is a new code-name for "Curacao" (in turn "Pitcairn.") Again, one can expect similar specs to the older generation, but with standard memory amount doubled, to 4 GB. The "Tobago" silicon is a new code-name for "Bonaire," and will drive the R7 360. The "Oland" driven R7 250 will carry on unchanged.
"Fiji" is the only new chip here, and it's apparent that there will be not one, but two SKUs with a fancy SKU name. "Radeon Fury" is doing the rounds. The top-end part will ship with an AIO liquid cooling solution, while the second-best one could be air-cooled. We predict that Fiji XT could [attempt to] compete with NVIDIA's GM200-based SKUs, namely the GTX 980 Ti and the GTX TITAN X; while the Fiji Pro could give the GTX 980 a run for its money.
Source:
VideoCardz
The spread is pretty cut and dry. "Hawaii," the chip driving the R9 290 series, will not only get a new codename as "Grenada," but also a seamless rebrand to the R9 390 series, with Grenada Pro making up the R9 390, and Grenada XT making up the R9 390X. One possibility could be AMD taking advantage of low 4 Gbit GDDR5 chip prices to cram 8 GB of standard memory amount, across Grenada's 512-bit wide memory interface. The R9 390X will compete with the GeForce GTX 970, while the R9 390 will offer an option in the vast price and performance gorge between the GTX 960 and GTX 970.
The "x70" moniker will get demoted from the Radeon R9 series, down to Radeon R7. There will be just one SKU, the Radeon R7 270, and it will be driven by the "Trinidad" silicon, which is a new code-name for "Curacao" (in turn "Pitcairn.") Again, one can expect similar specs to the older generation, but with standard memory amount doubled, to 4 GB. The "Tobago" silicon is a new code-name for "Bonaire," and will drive the R7 360. The "Oland" driven R7 250 will carry on unchanged.
"Fiji" is the only new chip here, and it's apparent that there will be not one, but two SKUs with a fancy SKU name. "Radeon Fury" is doing the rounds. The top-end part will ship with an AIO liquid cooling solution, while the second-best one could be air-cooled. We predict that Fiji XT could [attempt to] compete with NVIDIA's GM200-based SKUs, namely the GTX 980 Ti and the GTX TITAN X; while the Fiji Pro could give the GTX 980 a run for its money.
66 Comments on AMD Radeon Graphics Roadmap for 2015 Leaked
If you are then well yeah maybe get something with more ram and hey! next year a newer card will be released anyway with probably more memory, so if 4gb of vram is too little for you in the future you can... well wait for the future I guess.
Also consoles have 8gb of ram to play around with, not dedicated videoram.
Makes sense I guess if refined versions are able to keep up with nvidias options at price for performance levels.
Consoles have 8GB of combined memory, for OS and GPU... You probably don't need 8GB dedicated to each gpu and 16GB for the cpu... sloppy coding shouldn't be rewarded.
Although In saying that we should see more efficient resource usage now with WDDM 2.0 and proper unified memory support, so I guess MS and D3D are partly to blame there.
Even the bloated Skyrim only uses double going from 1080p to 4k...
For those games that do chug memory in the future... they will also probably need more gpu horsepower to handle 4k anyways and with DX12 for the first time 2 4gb cards will actually give you 8gb usable space.
It is not "sloppy coding" to have larger, more detailed environments in games. To do that, you need memory--the more the merrier.Because SSDs are base 10 just like HDDs are. They build them to 80 GB (80 billion bytes), 128 GB, etc. where memory is built to 4 GiB (2^30 * 4 bytes), 8 GiB, 16 GiB. We're talking about very specific numbers and how best to describe the number. It's no different than use a kilometer to measure the distance between towns instead of inches. You use the best unit for the job.
If you want to change that, get on their board... otherwise use the industry standards.When you are tessellating water under the map... it most certainly is sloppy coding.
vram usage is like a gas... it will always fill the space... if you give coders more space they will use it. Just because they use it doesn't make the code efficient.
Have you seen DDR4 dimms? Still stamped GB.
Frankly, adding a second term leads to confusion. Just knowing storage is base 10 and memory is base 2 is fairly straight forward... now if storage would just start being created as base 2 ... all would be right in the world.
6 more days and the speculation ends... yay.
There will come a day when memory is measured in base 10 and JEDEC will have a mess on its plate.
Also the Vanilla textures and mesh are pretty low res. GTA V is high res.....high detail..That's due to proper virtual addressing support in WDDM 2.0, not DX12.
DX11 has unified addressing already but Windows doesn't apply it properly. Hence why DX11 games in W7/8 get a crapton of system memory allocated for GPU paging.
And while those consoles inherently stood still in the land of technological advancement, the PC merely moved on in all those years.
So yeah they have a lot more memory to play/work with on the pc and the newer consoles (as they should).
By that ratio your 16 GiB of Vram will happen....lets say 4 - 5 years in the future and by that time we'll have seen many a new generation videocard and nobody will think anymore about the current "flagships".
If 8 GiB shows its value 2 years from now...well then upgrade at that time.
If you are arguing a videocard should last you longer then that:
1. then I agree in the sense that I find the current performance jumps way too small, the GTX980Ti and Titan X are a joke imo with the price the command and the performance this supposedly high-end cards produce.
2. then I don not agree in the sense that it does last longer then 2 years, but then that consumer is clearly not an enthusiast and will be the same bracket as you, a 4 GiB card will still be able to run all the games 2 years from now (probably more) just perhaps not on maxed settings (like your previous example of GTA5 on 4k resolution).
Either way its not a problem, 4 GiB right now is plenty with perhaps the exception of GTA5 on 4k (although we have benched cards with less then 6 GiB vram on 4k so riddle me that).
The enthusiast can upgrade when more is needed, the not so enthusiast will just play on settings that will work for the gpu.
But yeah monopoly is not wanted situation, even current duopoly is kind of lame(and I mean especially dgpus).
So even if you don't plan to buy it, you should hope the Fury is awesome.