Werft mal einen Blick hier drauf, sehr sehr interessante Fragen, die von AMD beantwortet wurden.
Ask Me Anything - Official AMD Radeon Representatives - Radeon - Graphics & Displays
Wichtige Auszüge vom AMD Mitarbeiter (Fragen lasse ich mal aussen vor Ps Paar unserer user hier waren dort ja auch aktiv, Als ich den Wall of Test schon sah, dachte ich dass es nur Skysnake sein kann und auch ein paar andere waren anwesend, danke für eure tollen Fragen.):
Sry es wurde immer mehr und mehr, aber es sind wichtige Aussagen...
Müsst somit nicht den ganzen Text durchlesen, habe das wichtigste hier rein kopiert, damit jeder up to date ist.
Mantle can be used to increase raw FPS, or to increase image quality while maintaining the same FPS.
It is a complete and standalone graphics API, meaning Mantle must be capable of coding and rendering all the in-game effects you see today. But Mantle also needs to be sufficiently extensible so that we can collaborate with game studios to create the effects of tomorrow—and it is extensible to do so!
Using a 100% reference design at launch ensures that AMD can control every facet of the initial production. It minimizes the number of variables that can "go wrong."
Our reference solutions are designed to accommodate every system that fully complies with the ATX and PCIe mechanical and electrical specifications. Further, we have OEM and system integrator customers that prefer a blower-style assembly. In order to accommodate all parties interested in purchasing a reference GPU, our hand is guided in the direction of the designs you see.
1) Frame pacing was 100% resolved on single-GPU systems in early 2013.
2) Frame pacing for multi-GPU systems, at any resolution (e.g. Eyefinity/4K), is fully resolved in hardware on the 290 and 290X.
3) Frame pacing for the R9 270, R9 280 and HD 7000 Series systems will require a software solution. Our engineers are working on that right now, and we intend to release a driver this quarter to resolve the issue.
Real numbers regarding Mantle will be published at the AMD Developer Summit running November 11-13 in San Jose. I will say that we are not undertaking such a mammoth effort to yield 3-4% performance--that would be a waste of time.
We are planning to announce more titles than what you saw at GPU14. Depending on the schedule, those announcements may come slightly after APU13.
We're partnered with:
Eidos Montreal, DICE, Square Enix, Rebellion, Codemasters, EA, Crytek, Irrational Games, Nixxes, and more. We have an excellent relationship with almost every major studio out there, and we're in frequent contact to assist with performance optimizations for Radeon.
My favorite is the new implementation of PowerTune on the 290X and 290. There's a lot of doom and gloom around the 95C temperature, because people are used to a world where the product is designed to run as cold as possible... but that's not the world we're living in with these units. The doom and gloom is based on an old viewpoint.
95C is the optimal temperature that allows the board to convert its power consumption into meaningful performance for the user. Every single component on the board is designed to run at that temperature throughout the lifetime of the product.
If you throttle the temperature down below that threshold, then the board must in turn consume less power to respect the new temperature limit. Consuming less power means lowering vcore and engine clock, which means less performance.
You want to take full advantage of product TDP to maximize performance, and that is accomplished with a 95C ideal operating temperature for the 290 and 290X.
Even with a third-party cooling solution, like the Accelero 3 some users have started deploying, the logic of PowerTune will still try to maximize TDP by allowing temperatures to float higher until some other limit is met (voltage, clock, fan RPM, whatever).
It's so bloody smart and it kills me that more people don't fully understand it.
Game developers requested Mantle themselves. That's the key difference. The industry told us they want it.
Johan from DICE sat across the table from Matt Skynner, the GM of our graphics business, and explained how he wanted a close-to-metal graphics API. Matt said "we can do that," and the rest was history.
Other devs are very excited when they learn about what Mantle is capable of, and how Mantle can help them bring their game to life on the PC.
A better cooler increases the watts of heat that the product can emit before the 95C equilibrium temperature is reached. In turn, this raises the maximum permissible clockspeed (within the limit of product TDP) the board can sustain.
Users with the Accelero coolers are finding they're reaching the clockspeed limit of the product at a lower temperature limit than 95C. So you can see how the experience is very customizable and interesting for enthusiasts.
This is up to the game developer. Mantle is a complete and high-performance graphics API, therefore the developer can use the performance boosts to increase raw FPS, or they can sustain the same FPS and increase image quality vs. other APIs.
I am not a developer, but I will answer as much as I can.
1) 4 blocks with 11 CUs each is the configuration of the R9 290X.
2) GDS via GWS should still be in the architecture.
3) Yes, the R9 290 and 290X are 1:8 DP. As to "why" I do not know, except to say that these are primarily gaming graphics cards, so it would make sense that the architectural implementations are optimized for these types of workloads.
5) I do not know what the FirePro team plans.
8) 290 and 290X support system unified addressing.
First and foremost, TrueAudio is a programmable DSP. Its most obvious use is signal processing for gaming audio, but you could conceivably program it to do audio filtering, voice control, biometrics or anything else a powerful DSP is capable of.
The answer to the FCAT question, FCAT is not the end-all-be-all of frame pacing. There are many provable scenarios where the observed performance is stutter-free, whereas FCAT results suggest that it should be stuttering like crazy. If I recall correctly, Tomb Raider is an instance of this. People should use their own eyeballs vs. relying on an automated test, because the automated testing absolutely does not tell the whole story.
What's clear, however. is that we had an issue with the consistency in frame delivery, and we've largely resolved that problem. The remaining scenarios will be resolved this quarter with a driver update that intelligently and algorithmically normalizes frame times.