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AMD Releases Fastest Mobile GPU
Stoobalou writes "AMD has scored another point over its graphics rival Nvidia with what it claims is the world's fastest single-GPU mobile graphics processor, the Radeon HD 6990M. While the red team is unlikely to hold the crown for long in the fast-moving world of discrete graphics, the company's latest chip is certainly impressive enough. Based on the TeraScale 2 unified processor architecture and the Barts GPU core, the Radeon HD 6990M — a mobile equivalent to the company's high-end Radeon HD 6990 PCI Express graphics card design — features 1,120 stream processing units, 56 texture units, 128 Z/stencil ROP units, and 32 color ROP units."
Faster than before !! Pay up !! And don't complain like it's Windows 8 MOTHERFUCKERS !!
Oh wait...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Yes, but it can't run old LucasArts 3D games. No table fog support in Radeons since forever. What a shame!
6990 - 590 = 6400
It's a whole 6400 faster!!1
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The better question is... what games really need it? Most of the popular games on the market are still programmed to run well on 7 year old hardware.
It'll be a bit before relative performance numbers are out, but I can tell you that, unless you've go the world's only MXM desktop motherboard, you're not going to be putting this mobile GPU into your desktop.
Long signatures suck.
apple should put this in the mini but we will likely get the POS i3 cpu with on board video at $700
Doesn't matter how fast it is if the driver can't use it. Where are the Linux drivers? I thought back when they were still ATI that they'd pledged to open up their hardware. As far as I know, in Linux we can get 2D acceleration only in a good open driver, or we can get 3D acceleration in a closed driver that is otherwise not so good.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Hope you got a spare battery. Or three.
... seriously?
The better question is... what games really need it? Most of the popular games on the market are still programmed to run well on 7 year old hardware.
Well sure, some game still run on old hardware. Whether or not the run well is a completely subjective opinion.
... low. VERY low. Even modern IGP solutions will play many games at 20fps. But I like to see this sort of high-end tech come out, because it puts downward pressure on mid-range cards, that perform quite well considering their low price. I won't buy a top-of-the-line card every year ... but I'm glad that someone will, because those purchases drive the innovation.
... so if you're still playing MW2 or some other brainless console port, sure. You're right. Pat yourself on the back for that earth-shattering revelation.
Now I'm not saying you need to buy new, top of the line hardware every year to enjoy your games... but the exponential speed/power increase means that you need to be getting mid-range hardware every few years to play modern titles at high resolution with decent detail.
Again, you're not wrong. But I like to play at FHD with 4x AA and very high details. If you're okay with VGA @ low, then you can keep your dual 9800gtx setup for another few years. See, the low/entry level point for graphics performance is
You may also notice that most popular games on the market are console ports, designed to run on consoles. But not all of them
I mean really who gives a fuddly about crysis if it can't even do a few windows correctly. Pfft!
They'd only just recently made it possible to play video correctly them Whamo no Gnome 3.
Who cares if they can make better hardware if the software can't talk to it.
I think that comes from the fact that the target demographic for the apple mini thinks that "processor" is a fancy word for "blender." I didn't think they advertised components of apple products. You buy an apple laptop, it comes in either "normal" or "fancy metal 'pro.'" My limited experience has been that if you ask a mac user for details on their computer, they'll say "Well... it's white?" Not exactly a lot of demand for better processors.
we will likely get...
If you buy it without this GPU, then Apple was right not to spend the money on it. Don't buy it if it's not up to your needs and Apple will learn to set the product/price appropriate to the market.
Personally, I don't care much about desktop/laptop GPU power anymore as much as I care about what Apple can cram into the iPad 3...
E pluribus unum
Comment removed based on user account deletion
a mobile equivalent to the company's high-end Radeon HD 6990 PCI Express graphics card design — features 1,120 stream processing units, 56 texture units, 128 Z/stencil ROP units, and 32 color ROP units." Except that the PCI-E version has more than twice as many stream processors (in the order of 3500), 64 color ROPs and 70% higher memory frequency. This might be the best mobile unit, but the 6990M is not, in any way except its name, something comparable to the HD 6990 PCI-E... It is, in all specifications, at most, half of what the non mobile version is. Marketing... Marketing...
and the knee burning will be totally worth it for my important prime95s on a plane!!! yea!
Finally, a GPU to do some bit coin mining when on the go!
The heat will melt the plastic in the laptop lol
Previewing comments are for sissies!
I need all that power. To open up a new VT and use vim!
While there are... other obstacles... I'm pretty sure that at recent vintage iMacs have MXM slots, and are arguably desktops. Good luck finding an MXM card that plays nice with Apple's peculiar EFI implementation; and the thermal and mechanical limits of a chassis designed with aesthetics at the forefront; but it should at least work mechanically.
Running sandy bridge here (2310), onboard GPU is impressive. Dont knock it till youve tried it.
Yeah, the subject parses as "AMD releases fastest slow GPU". None of the important data is shown.
Rethinking email
It has support for both OpenCL and DirectCompute, both of which Adobe could have used instead of CUDA. While it's true that AMD GPUs won't help with Photoshop, that's not AMDs fault.
But I want to be able to run Duke Nukem Forever!
I am not devoid of humor.
In addition to the driver-specific website pointed by others in this thread, Phoronix is also a nice source of information :
- they regularily feature benchmarks pitting closed- versus open-source drivers.
- they post news about support for recent hardware being added to Kernel / Mesa, etc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yet good hardware accelerated 3D graphics is still not available in an open source driver for Linux. Phoronix's benchmarks show this quite clearly.
Yet, it's slowing coming in.
This just in. Apparently, on the HD6000 side of things, the performance gap is shrinking. We're still talking about a 2:1 gap, but it's better than the 10:1 reported earlier.
It takes time. Time for the OSS developper getting used to write good drivers for it. Time for good consolidated architectures to emerge and gain momentum (like the Gallium3D with a good separation between API front-ends and hw back-ends). Time for hw manufacturer to integrate OSS in their development pipeline : it took enormous time before the first documentation could be green-lighted for publishing by their legal department, currently they only lag a few weeks to a few months behind. By the time their reach the HD8000 generation (or whatever it will be called at that point in time). AMD promised that the OSS will be integrated into the development process from the beginning.
Contrast it with Intel : they've been much longer in the OSS game. Currently, as (non-PowerVR-based) hardware is rolled to stores, there is driver support available (okay: there are still hicups - initial sandy bridge was a buggy, wasn't available in mainstream distros and required pulling the latest development version). But that's still support released almost simultaneously. And benchmark show almost similar performance between the Linux (opensource only) and the Windows (blob) drivers.
I have 2 computers with Radeon cards, an X1500, and an HD5450. [...] Probably the open source drivers are emulating the 3D with software.
You're doing something wrong... You should check on your distro's forum if you didn't miss something somewhere. :
Specially with the HD5450
- it's a mid-range card (the biggest performance gap happens on highest range of cards)
- it's a previous-to-latest generation of cards (by now bugs must have been ironed out).
It should perform decently.
Are you sure that you're getting latest up-to-date drivers from your distro's repositories? (Some distro use additional repositories to get the latest versions, otherwise you only get bug- and security- fixes for whatever version comes with the stock distro)
Are you sure you're running the *Gallium3d* variant of drivers? (the "r600g" driver ?) (Some distro still used the older variant "r600" by default. Gallium3d has been making gigantic leaps forward in the latest months).
(Also there's a bug affecting some AMD hardware users: you might need to add "irqpoll" on the boot parameters. read your /var/log/message log. If it complains about "irq nn: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)" and then "Disabling IRQ #nn", you might be affected by a bug which slowly brings the 3D acceleration to a crawl)
One of my machine has an AGP variant of HD4500. I run latest openSUSE + official repository from SUSE for latest X11 version. (I still have the stock kernel, so I don't benefit from some advantages of the latest kernel modules). I got an up-to-date Xorg and Mesa. The performance isn't stellar, but its decent enough.
I think overall it a sign of the whole graphics situation. Sufficient and decent OSS solution have started to appear. But saddly, it's not always clearly documented and made easy. For performance people need often the lastet version, a version newer than the one which came with stock distribution.
- But this latest version doesn't always exist (in the sandy bridge case, initial enthousiast needed to pull the source and compile it themselves ). It would be better if more collaboration between distribution+developpers+manufacturer happens. So we see more "official additional repositories" (the repositroy on openSUSE's buildservice to get latest X11 and Mesa is a nice starting point).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]