Rumor: Nvidia Mobile Pascal-GPUS during Computex 2016

when i look at windows 10 with the store and the apps xbox app it makes me wonder if microsoft will come out with sme kind of windows 10 xbox-pc hybrid type gaming device which is portable with nvidia pascal gpus in it

 

Hmm interesting. Well considering that this is a rumor we can wait and hope for more information and clarification from Nvidia. I hope we get more information about the desktop cards and whether or not they are going to have more than 4gb Vram for the 1070 and 1080.

 

Not long ago nvidia said that new mobile Maxwell based GPU's are coming, 970mx and 980mx.

This seems just like the title said, a rumor and probably fake.

 

Yeah idk, seems weird, I think mobile will come later.

At CES Nvidia said that PX2 would start shipping early samples to select partners in Q2, will full availability in the second half of the year. The PX2 has a total TDP of 300w with 2 PASCAL GPU's on it. So those two pascal units are probably 120w each or something.

I would imagine those exact units would show up on something, either desktop and or mobile before the PX2 ships. I personally think desktop. I think Hilbert's right about the timeframe. They'll probably paper launch in April and the cards won't show up till like June, July. I imagine Polaris will already be shipping by then.

 

That rumor was debunked the next day. This rumor is likely true.

 

So is it true what some guys have been saying in the forum of late that these and the big day pascal are not going to be great at Direct X 12? Essentially they are Maxwell ++?

If true I will wait till Volta and more DirectX 12 games.

 

No one knows because no one knows anything about Pascal yet.

 

Well that's good to hear. Damn people and their opinions veiled as truth...

 

Well people are assuming that Pascal was already in it's design phase when the whole Async problem hit, so based on that chances are it might not be fixed. There is nothing concrete yet as to whether its fixed or not, if Nvidia even needs to make a change (Nvidia is claiming they can fix it with drivers), or if it even matters in terms of overall performance.

There are two DX12 benchmarks out, both feature Async, The Fury X wins one, the 980Ti wins the other.

People are trying glean information from both those benchmarks, but it's essentially pointless until there are more of them, including actual games.

 

Yer I been keeping up to date. One thing I don't understand is that if DX12 is meant to be less reliant on drivers how come we need a driver fix for Async to fix it?

 

On top of nobody knowing much about pascal yet, except that it's much faster for neural network applications, we don't know much about DX12 performance yet. There have been two benchmarks, two.

This is one : http://www.anandtech.com/show/9659/fable-legends-directx-12-benchmark-analysis/2

This is the other: http://anandtech.com/show/10067/ashes-of-the-singularity-revisited-beta/6 (the recent beta, not the old)

asynchronous compute exists to take advantage of idle hardware, in simple terms - if you turn it off and the code performs better, you should probably keep it off.

Contrary to popular belief 'async compute effects' don't exist, you're still running those operations on the same hardware; as somebody said "GPUs are already embarrassingly parallel" - the main advantage of 'async', from what I've been able to glean, is concurrency; ie: executing an operation (eg timewarp) without it having to wait in queue for whatever shader was running previously. This is useful when you're optimizing for latency, such as in VR - a benchmark for which nvidia was lambasted as being hugely inferior to AMD, and the issue afaik was then fixed in a driver update - queue people claiming these things can't be fixed in a driver because it's a hardware problem.

I mean take a look at these fable legends results



noticing any strange inconsistencies ? It's odd to say the least

Also from the say extremetech feature on fable, they have this graph


leaving aside the fact I don't know what these numbers mean, let's take this to be a perfect representation of performance in this game;

Fury X outperforms a Ti, more interestingly a 390X is almost on par with r9 fury

(I could have sworn there was an article about the fix for vr latency but I can't find it I found this https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3rsezo/new_nvidia_driver_finally_allowed_me_to_try_vr/)

If you're really interested read through this thread, somebody wrote a simple program to test pure compute and mixed loads on both gcn and maxwell
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...and-analysis-thread.57188/page-9#post-1869030

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3gwnsm/nvidia_gameworks_vr_sli_test/

TLDR: We need more information about everything

 

Nvidia currently does not have the hardware to do simultaneous compute/graphics queuing, at least as far as we know -- they essentially process everything serially at the moment. On Nvidia GPU's the majority of scheduling those tasks takes place in software, on the CPU. Some people are claiming Nvidia can work around the lack of hardware by using some of the parallelism stuff they build into the architecture for CUDA purposes. But these changes would take place at a driver level because the scheduling is at the driver level.

Whether or not Nvidia can fix the problem with a driver remains to be seen. The head of their SW development team recently made a tweet that may have hinted towards this coming. And they have said in the past that they can can do it with drivers. But there hasn't yet been a driver that officially declares his solved or anything.

 

That's interesting and answers a few questions. Thanks guys. Will be watching these cards closely.

 

Not only does Fable not emphasize async compute, but nvidia has its own path, and amd theirs AFAIK.


In the context of DX12 and what can and should be done with async compute, AMD has it right.

Arguing about the semantics is useless. One is on one's own to determine what or shouldnt be explained.

 

I'm going to argue asynchronous compute is a misnomer and just obfuscates the issue

They did solve the VR latency issue in drivers amidst a frenzy of criticism and accusations of the problem being in hardware

 

It is a misnomer.

 

Of course AMD has it right, they wrote the specification for it.

Fable uses Async compute fine, its just that it's not computing hundreds of different light sources like AoS is. The type of game definitely matters in how much it gets used and obviously an RTS with massive battles and hundreds of light sources is going to emphasize the performance over a third person moba. Which was my point in the other thread, AoS is literally worse case for Nvidia's performance in regards to Async.

Games should have two different paths, eventually every architecture is going to have it's own path. That's part of DX12's strength, the developer is capable of optimizing specifically for the architecture and vendor.

I don't know enough about the VR latency stuff to really comment on it. I know that I have a Oculus DK2 and I used it on my 980 and it seemed to work fine in every game I played, including the Crytek Dino demo thing. But aside from that, no idea.

 

Check out that beyond3d thread, you'll find it interesting

 

Explanation is simple. Both Hawaii and Fiji have same amount of ROPs (64) and ACEs (8). And probably many other things remained in same count or unimproved on uArch level.

There can be scenario where r9-290x/390x performs better than Fury X, and that is when application relies only on pixel fillrate. As core of Hawaii can be clocked higher and therefore it can achieve higher fillrate.
But in that case 980Ti would beat both chips as it has 96 ROPs and like 50% higher fillrate as it has quite some boost out of the box.

If game was all about texture fillrate, then 980Ti = 290x/390x and Fury X would take crown by far.

And those are just 2 aspects out of dozens which matter. And weakest point for each requirement matters. And that's way how gtx 960 can outperform gtx 780Ti.