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- Jul 31, 2014
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System Name | Diablo | Baal | Mephisto | Andariel |
---|---|
Processor | i5-3570K@4.4GHz | 2x Xeon X5675 | i7-4710MQ | i7-2640M |
Motherboard | Asus Sabertooth Z77 | HP DL380 G6 | Dell Precision M4800 | Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Tablet |
Cooling | Swiftech H220-X | Chassis cooled (6 fans + HS) | dual-fanned heatpipes | small-fanned heatpipe |
Memory | 32GiB DDR3-1600 CL9 | 96GiB DDR3-1333 ECC RDIMM | 32GiB DDR3L-1866 CL11 | 8GiB DDR3L-1600 CL11 |
Video Card(s) | Dual GTX 670 in SLI | Embedded ATi ES1000 | Quadro K2100M | Intel HD 3000 |
Storage | many, many SSDs and HDDs.... |
Display(s) | 1 Dell U3011 + 2x Dell U2410 | HP iLO2 KVMoIP | 3200x1800 Sharp IGZO | 1366x768 IPS with Wacom pen |
Case | Corsair Obsidian 550D | HP DL380 G6 Chassis | Dell Precision M4800 | Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Tablet |
Audio Device(s) | Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD | None | On-board | On-board |
Power Supply | Corsair AX850 | Dual 750W Redundant PSU (Delta) | Dell 330W+240W (Flextronics) | Lenovo 65W (Delta) |
Mouse | Logitech G502, Logitech G700s, Logitech G500, Dell optical mouse (emergency backup) |
Keyboard | 1985 IBM Model F 122-key, Ducky YOTT MX Black, Dell AT101W, 1994 IBM Model M, various integrated |
Software | FAAAR too much to list |
I wouldn't go so far as to say dominance, it's just that AMD is finally getting their money's worth out of their 'metal'.
- AMD uses a wider bus
- AMD uses more shaders
- AMD runs at lower clocks
- Polaris provides about similar (or slightly higher) perf/clock to Pascal
- Polaris still has a lower perf/watt than Pascal
- GCN has not radically changed since HD7xxx.
AMD just runs a wider GPU across the board, as they have done for a long time. GCN is geared to be an extremely balanced arch that has some overcapacity on the VRAM end. It is built to let the core do all the work it can do, whereas Nvidia's arch is always focused at 'efficiency gains through tight GPU balance' - Nvidia obtains that balance by cutting heavily into bus width and removing everything from the GPU core that isn't required for gaming. They've tried several things, of which DP was the first thing they dropped with Kepler, then delta compression enabled them to further reduce bus width. This is also why Nvidia's cards don't stretch their legs at higher resolutions, but rather lose performance. Only the GDDR5X-supported 1080 avoids that fate.
On DX11, AMD GPU's were just fine and they excelled only at higher resolutions. Why? Not just because of VRAM, but because of the fact that higher res = lower CPU load. In DX12, GCN gets to stretch its legs even earlier and also at lower resolutions, in part also because of the better CPU usage of that API. Vulkan is similar. That CPU usage was the last hurdle for GCN to really come to fruition. Say what you want, but AMD has really made a smart move here, even though we can doubt how conscious that move has really been. They have effectively gained architectural advantage by letting the market do most of the work.
The irony is that the market for gaming has moved towards GCN, and GCN has seen very minimal architectural changes, while the market is moving away from Nvidia's cost/efficiency improvement-focused GPU architecture. At the same time, Nvidia can almost eclipse that change through a much higher perf/watt, but that only hides so much of the underlying issue, an issue of Nvidia GPU's having to clock really high to gain solid performance, because they lack not only a wide bus right now, but also raw shader counts.
I think it is inevitable, and safe to predict, that Nvidia has now reached a new cap with regards to clock speeds on the core. The only way forward is for them to once again start building bigger and wider GPUs. AMD, on the flip side, has more wiggle room and a lot of things left to improve - clocks, efficiency, and judging the RX480, they also have space left on the die.
nV has also been incrementally widening their SMs each gen, very likely in order to better match increasing output resolutions.
As for DP, AMD also removed DP from GCN. On the original GCN1 chips, it's driver limited to 1/2 perf. on GCN1.1 and beyond, it been cut down in hardware to 1/4, 1/8 and I think the current is 1/16, very close to nV's 1/32 number for gaming cards.
Particles are actually just a bunch of tiny polygons with texture attached to them. Why wouldn't you run them on GPU? Especially since we have specialized features like Geometric Instancing to handle just that, hundreds of identical elements.
That's when they get rendered (and they get rendered on the GPU just fine and as intended and expected).
You still need to calculate position and movement like any other entity in the scene before the scene gets rendered... ffs man, this is basic renderer workflow...