Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Reveals Radeon Sky Series For Cloud Gaming, Previews Radeon HD 7990

Posted by Soulskill on from the future-of-gaming-whether-you-like-it-or-not dept.

MojoKid writes "AMD made a number of interesting announcements today at the Game Developers Conference, currently taking place in San Francisco. AMD revealed their 'Radeon Sky' series of graphics products targeted at cloud gaming and virtualized computing applications. The company also showed off the dual-GPU powered AMD Radeon HD 7990, and extended the 'Never Settle: Reloaded' gaming bundle program to include BioShock Infinite. AMD revealed three Radeon Sky Series cards, two based on the Tahiti GPU and another based on Pitcairn. The top of the line Radeon Sky 900 is powered by two Tahiti GPUs linked to 6GB of memory (3GB per GPU). The Sky 700 is powered by a single Tahiti GPU and the Sky 500 is based on Pitcairn. All of the cards are passively cooled and are designed for cloud gaming / computing servers. The upcoming high-end, consumer targeted Radeon HD 7990 was also previewed, but few details were given. Devon Nekechuk, Product Manager of AMD Graphics, did say the triple-fan setup was whisper quiet. We think it's safe to assume the card features 6GB of memory and clocks are in-line with current Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards."

53 comments

  1. WTH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What the Hell is "Cloud Gaming"?

    1. Re:WTH by Iniamyen · · Score: 1

      I think it means having a backend for a game consisting of distributed computing resources.

    2. Re:WTH by Endo13 · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure, but it certainly sounds like "cloud gaming" is basically companies that provide the heavy hardware to stream games to PCs, for people who can't afford good gaming rigs. I wouldn't have guessed there's that big a market there yet to warrant special graphics cards though.

      So, just my guess, take it for what it's worth.

      --
      There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
    3. Re:WTH by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure, but it certainly sounds like "cloud gaming" is basically companies that provide the heavy hardware to stream games to PCs, for people who can't afford good gaming rigs. I wouldn't have guessed there's that big a market there yet to warrant special graphics cards though.

      Well, they're special for two reasons. First, they have to support multiple users - it's inefficient if one person playing monopolizes the entire server. So the GPU has to be sharable, and in order to do so at decent framerates and resolutions, it has to be really powerful. nVidia's offering only allows something like 16 people per server, which is considered low. Since servers have reduce requirements to cooling and power consumption, you can stick in super powerful power gobbling cards that wouldn't quite work out in a desktop PC due to noise and power constraints (considering a 1300W power supply is probably the max you can have on a 110V15A circuit, and most people are NOT going to rewire their house to run a dedicated power socket for their PC... but a server doesn't need such restrictions). So the more powerful the card, the more users per server you can have.

      Second, the rendered output has to be recompressed to be sent over the internet. Would be handy if there was dedicated hardware to compress the video output and send it back

      This could be the killer app for the "Killer NIC" - the compressed video from the GPU gets sent directly to the NIC to be sent to the player directly without involving the CPU at all - the whole IP stack handed on board for each connection.

    4. Re:WTH by davester666 · · Score: 1

      It's like the current version of SimCity.

      It looks great from a distance, but once you get there, you realize that it's just vapor.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    5. Re:WTH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Basically what OnLive has been doing since 2009. Nothing new here, and it works much better than you might think. Remember your average console + TV combo has upwards 150ms input lag. High latency bluetooth controller, triple buffered rendering, high image processing latency in TV. Most people don't care about that, so why would they care about similar cloud gaming latency?

  2. yeah whatever... by fredan · · Score: 4, Funny

    how many megahashes do they produce?

    1. Re:yeah whatever... by Tynin · · Score: 1

      Since it is primarily the number of stream processors that drive the hash rate, my 7870 with 1280 stream processors does ~380 Mhash/s, so this new Sky 900 card with 3584 processors should be able to push ~1000 Mhash/s, considering they have near identical clock rates.

    2. Re:yeah whatever... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Judging by the state of Southern Islands drivers, they'll produce a LOT of mega-hashes.

  3. NVIDIA..? "Sky" by Lashat · · Score: 2

    Will NVIDIA release a repsonse product or do they already have a "cloud" offering that is not announced?

    anyone...

    --
    For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  4. Re:NVIDIA..? "Sky" by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Informative

    They already announced it.
    It is called NVIDIA GRID.

  5. Re:NVIDIA..? "Sky" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    GRID: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

  6. The 7990 is bigger than some motherboards. by RubberChainsaw · · Score: 3, Funny

    It finally happened, add-in graphics cards are bigger than the rest of the computer.

    --
    I welcome our new 99% overlords.
    1. Re:The 7990 is bigger than some motherboards. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's been like that for a while now. My GTX 580 is bigger than my ATX mobo.
      Any high-end gaming pc will not fit in most cases in fact, due to the long cards.

  7. But will it blend? by DigitAl56K · · Score: 2

    Seems Blender's Cycles renderer is still having problems with AMD GPUs, and I see the finger pointed in AMD's direction. It would be nice to have some more hardware choices, but NVIDIA seems to be the only options at this point in time.

    1. Re:But will it blend? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      just curious since my friend works on a different part of blender, how does Blender's Cycles feature work? Is it OpenCL based?

    2. Re:But will it blend? by exomondo · · Score: 2

      Seems Blender's Cycles renderer is still having problems with AMD GPUs, and I see the finger pointed in AMD's direction.

      In what specifically? I have to support nV and AMD graphics cards and get a lot of eng samples from both and when writing to the standard i don't find AMD cards to be any more buggy.

  8. 3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by sdguero · · Score: 1

    I know its just a reference design but putting three fans, even two fans, on a video card is stupid. In all likelyhood, that more than doubles the failure rate vs a single fan cooling setup...

    1. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 1

      I know its just a reference design but putting three fans, even two fans, on a video card is stupid. In all likelyhood, that more than doubles the failure rate vs a single fan cooling setup...

      That's unlikely. It would require that fan failures make up much more than 50% of total failures (I'm too lazy to do the math, I'm guessing at least 66%) and it assumes that there is no redundancy - that when you lose one fan, the other two can't speed up and cover the air-flow requirements at a cost of increased fan noise.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    2. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by sdguero · · Score: 1

      Out of the dozens of video card failures I've seen at work, only one wasn't caused by a cooling/fan problem (capacitor blew out, but this could possibly be traced to insufficient cooling as well). I'd say that 95% of the time (if not 99%) moving parts are the root cause of modern PC failures, i.e. fans and disks.

    3. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I know its just a reference design but putting three fans, even two fans, on a video card is stupid. In all likelyhood, that more than doubles the failure rate vs a single fan cooling setup...

      All other things being equal, sure. However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm? :)

    4. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That would depend very much on X.

    5. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by kermidge · · Score: 1

      If one of three fans die, you have time to save, shut down, replace.
      If one of one fans die, you hope the card will automagically shut itself down before permanent damage is done, that you have a replacement fan or card on hand, or that your mobo has a working vid out.

      Rather reminds me of a question from Chris Crawford's Balance of Power, after you've inadvertently started World War III: "What will you do now, smart person?"

    6. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by sdguero · · Score: 1

      Do you run special software to monitor your GPU fans at all times? I don't, nor do I want to. I just expect that if the fans fail other components will shut down before they suffer thermal damage (not always the case though, especially in GPUs /coughnvidiacough). Not to mention that if the fans are not hot-swappable, redundancy is pretty pointless because you still have to shutdown and get out a screwdriver. In this case, it looks like you may need more than a screwdrive to replace any of those GPU fans (assumign they are replacable at all, MANY GPU fans are not).

      I usually don't know if any of the fans in my system are working when I'm in an OS unless I put my head under the desk and listen for them. I could run some snazztastic radeon montiring tool I suppose, but I'd rather avoid the way too often update notifications, resource utilization, software conflicts, and general PITA that comes with instaling that junk.

      From a reliability standpoint, the less moving parts in a PC the better.

    7. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by blind+biker · · Score: 1

      However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm?

      One fan at 3X... for a sufficiently small X.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
    8. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by kermidge · · Score: 1

      It's not that I don't get what you're saying; different strokes, and all that. And I have no great liking for extra parts, either; just enough to get the job done as I prefer.

      Yes, I run psensors; right now it's displaying CPU temp in the icon in Unity launcher - I could change that to GPU. What I have set are some values in BIOS for "if all hell breaks loose", and psensors is set to notify me if certain temps are reached by either CPU or GPU. But since the machine is always on that wouldn't matter if I'm not here to see them; I don't have any program to shut down the machine but I bet a smart fellow could write a script for doing so. I don't know how accurate the reported temps are, not having an appropriate thermometer, and not knowing how accurate the onboard chip is. From what I can gather from what I've read on AMD's site and from data from Tom's Hardware, CPU temp seems to be close to projected actual for my load, ditto for video card under heavy load. Reported fan speeds seem to be close, given specs from their manufacturers and, in the case of the CPU cooler, from frostytech also.

      So far as I can tell I have no problems with update notifications (all updates are done at once when there are any, whether for kernel, OS elements, browsers, drivers, applications, or utility programs - a few times a week perhaps; a few clicks and entering a password is not what I'd consider onerous), resource load, software conflicts, and I haven't gotten a pain in the ass from installing and briefly setting my preferences in one utility and several times in BIOS, once for each CPU and GPU that's been in the machine.

      But that wasn't my point. If one of three fans died, I could reduce the settings for card and programs to let me limp along until either the fan or the card could be replaced. (I had no notion of hot swapping a bloody fan, btw.) This is when a monitoring app might come in handy, because I'd have historical readings to compare against. That would help me, for instance, did I have one of these cards, because I haven't a spare card on hand and the onboard video died along with the NIC two years ago. (I was saving up for parts - which could have been spares as they were gotten - for a new build but that went away about as quickly as the several pounds of calf muscle and blood clot. Gotta love that DVT.)

      Oh, yeah, I had an 8800GT die last year. As hot as that card ran normally.... Don't really know why, though, and my hardware guy hasn't gotten around yet to tearing it down to find out. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to have a fuse or something, aina?

    9. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by GauteL · · Score: 1

      However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm?

      One fan at 3X... for a sufficiently small X.

      This is an enthusiasts card, pushing the boundaries of the current generation AMD GPUs to squeeze out more performance. I think it is safe to say that X will not be sufficiently small. Or more accurately; 3X will not be sufficiently small.

      I would venture to guess that fan reliability scales super-linearly with fan speed and that we're talking about a speed for which the failure rate of one fan of speed X is smaller than the failure rate of any of 3 fans at 3X.

      I just don't think the AMD engineers are total idiots. Obviously I have no evidence, but I prefer not to assume they are.

    10. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by blind+biker · · Score: 1

      This is an enthusiasts card, pushing the boundaries of the current generation AMD GPUs to squeeze out more performance. I think it is safe to say that X will not be sufficiently small. Or more accurately; 3X will not be sufficiently small.

      I would venture to guess that fan reliability scales super-linearly with fan speed and that we're talking about a speed for which the failure rate of one fan of speed X is smaller than the failure rate of any of 3 fans at 3X.

      I just don't think the AMD engineers are total idiots. Obviously I have no evidence, but I prefer not to assume they are.

      I see that you took my innocent little joke, and went with it! Well, OK then, I'll go one further and declare that my statement is true for X=0.

      Note that, logically, when I said "sufficiently small" I didn't talk about the needs of the graphic card's cooling. I was only looking at the fans' reliability.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
    11. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All other things being equal, sure. However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm? :)

      You left out the third possibility: one fan at X rpm with thrice the airflow surface (or about 70% bigger on each side).

      Not sure how that would work given the geometry of the card but it is a possible answer. :)

  9. Speed Versus Reliability by CAOgdin · · Score: 2

    I wish ATI would focus more energy on making their product stable, reliable and unable to be corrupted from innocent programs on the same computer. Right now, ATI and Nvidia drive the industry, and they couldn't give a damn about the BSODs they create!

    1. Re:Speed Versus Reliability by Mike+Frett · · Score: 1

      Are you in the right year? Let me bring you up to speed, AMD bought ATI, ATI is gone. As far as stability, I can't say I've had any problem with AMDs drivers for my 6670 on Windows or Linux. Where as I have had all sorts of stability problems with Nvidia on Linux, which is odd since most people say Nvidia is the best for Linux, even though all the forums are full of question on how to resolve issues with Nvidia. Seems backwards to me. o0

  10. Where are the consumer passive cards? by afidel · · Score: 1

    Why is it that the fastest AMD based passive cards are based on the 7770 and yet for the "cloud" market they've got the equivalent of 7950 available? My recent build used a 650ti with super quiet fans because there is no current generation passively cooled card capable of 1080p gaming.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    1. Re:Where are the consumer passive cards? by Endo13 · · Score: 1

      Probably because the "cloud" parts are basically the same stuff, just clocked way down to run cooler? Just a guess.

      --
      There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
    2. Re:Where are the consumer passive cards? by Trongy · · Score: 1

      Passive cooling isn't the right terminology. CPU heat sinks in most severs these days don't have fans attached either. They rely on the much more powerful case fans in servers and the better optimised airflow. These GPU cards will work the same way. The servers will not be quiet.

    3. Re:Where are the consumer passive cards? by afidel · · Score: 1

      Sure, but I can move a lot of CFM silently with 140mm fans compared to the little 60-80mm fans on the video cards.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  11. Eh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ATI is lucky they are the only other major video card competitor and the only other major cpu manufacturer. Because if there were 3 or more major players in the cpu and gpu arena ATI would be dead in the water, they live off the scraps Nvidia and intel don't snap up.

    ATI makes shit anymore. Everything they make, even their high end products are always defeated by the competitions mid range products that run a lot cooler and run a lot more reliable.

    1. Re:Eh. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Informative

      FUD

      The latest AMD CPUs are just as fast as icore5's for single tasking and can multitask for 50% of the cost. My phenomII is older, but has virtualization instructions and a hexcore architecture than can run VMWare Workstation smoothly where an icore5 would be all choppy and struggle.

      The ATI cards are very competitive and slashdot should mention the ATI 7790 which is only $150 and very competitive value wise for those who do not want to blow $700 for a new powersupply + 2 card slot mega card.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    2. Re:Eh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      who cares how great the hardware is if the drivers suck.. It's amazing amd still makes money on gpus. their drivers don't even handle exceptions properly, resulting in bsods. even when they don't crash, running anything that isn't the latest 3 games optimized in a given driver version, and you're in for pain.

    3. Re:Eh. by Myself337 · · Score: 1

      and cost 33% more...

      --
      I'm poor. Please donate. http://albanypcs.com
  12. It all depends on the driver... by Turmoyl · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just as has been the story with ATI (now AMD) for more than a decade, it simply does not matter what kind of hardware they produce if they can't write a driver that is solid enough for things like gaming and GPGPU. No one is going to be satisfied with buggy GL, screen tears, etc., and things like that wreak absolute havoc on GPGPU solutions.

    I have tried ATI cards several times over the years only to be repeatedly disappointed to the point of returning them. Returns are so common that Newegg, who does not easily take returns, does not bat an eyelash when it comes to accepting an ATI/AMD card back.

    Without me saying a word my GPGPU guys recently had me convert their lone ATI/AMD-based system over to Nvidia due to these long-running driver issues. Unless/until AMD can definitively demonstrate that they have broken this poor coding cycle, and will not allow it to occur again, I simply cannot and will not recommend their GPU products to anyone regardless of the specs, hype, or pretty boxes.

    1. Re:It all depends on the driver... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      I have been running ATI graphics cards since the radeon 8500 in 2001. I have never ran into problems with drivers. Perhaps the occasional graphical glitch. My 9700 retired in 2006 after I put heatsinks on the ram to extend the life for a secondary box. My only issues were when I jumped to linux. (Debian) at least with windows they were solid as far as im concerned. I hate to be a fanboy, but AMD and ATI have given me many years of gaming bliss. Ill keep my money where my mouth is.

  13. How is the pci-e bus setup on the dual-GPU cards? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    How is the pci-e bus setup on the dual-GPU cards?.

    each GPU get's 8 lanes? pci-e switch? dual core?

  14. high bandwidth use with cloud gameing and control by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    high bandwidth use with cloud gameing and control lag can make games suck.

    Also no / limited user mods and maybe maps as well with the cloud.

  15. This is big news: 7990 is only 2 slots by michaelmalak · · Score: 1

    The 7970 was great because it was only $500 for 2TFLOPS SP, 1 TFLOP DP, but the downside was it took 3 slots. The 7990 looks like it takes up only 2 slots. That means an ATX-sized motherboard like the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 can handle three and possibly four (with case modification) such cards in tandem.

  16. 7990 is not new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The 7990 has been around for quite a while - I don't understand why it's being announced as "NEW!"

    For me, the only recent GPU news that was interesting was the GTX Titan - single NVidia chip that's pretty much equivalent to a 7990 (faster at some things, slower at others).

    And I can harness three of them together...

    1. Re:7990 is not new by lightknight · · Score: 1

      Yeah, no. The 7990, while often announced, has yet to really be pushed to market. Newegg is only listing one board, as such, at the moment.

      Perhaps you are thinking of the 7970?

      --
      I am John Hurt.
  17. Re:How is the pci-e bus setup on the dual-GPU card by Ironhandx · · Score: 1

    Effectively its quite similar to a dual core CPU, except since the calculations are all so similar the workload is evenly split by the card & drivers.

  18. Cloud (11 hits) by MatrixCubed · · Score: 1

    So the word "cloud" appears 11 times in the article, and in each case, is used in a context in which it comes off as a buzz-word or in an SEO-optimized fashion.

    What I'd like to know is, how does it fit into the "cloud" paradigm?

    • Does it somehow better handle streamed texture and shader content, thus making my "cloud gaming experience" feel more fluid?
    • Is the chipset designed to integrate with next-gen tablets and smartphones, which would typically be "cloud gaming experience"-devices?
    • Will it better handle next-gen games typically offered as a "cloud gaming experience" (think recent SimCity and worse)? OR...
    • Is it simply being released at a time where "cloud gaming experience" is a convenient marketing buzzword, intended to generate sales among the unwashed masses?
  19. It's not I folks: It's Jeremiah Cornelius... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    THIS is why he's doing it & proof of it, here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193 when others pointed out Jeremiah Cornelius forgot to submit one of the "first post spams" (masquerading as myself, by posting as AC & using some old posts of mine or other b.s. he put up), & JC mistakenly submitted one of the impersonations of myself as his registered 'luser' name here on /. forums.

    Pretty pitiful actually, but like every up to no good idiot does? He screwed up & submitted it under his registered 'luser' name here, instead of his ac submittals he's been doing.

    * Jeremiah Cornelius: DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN: Seek professional psychiatric help!

    (Since Jeremiah Cornelius obviously can't get over the fact he made a spelling error on what it is HE ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's HIS!)

    APK

    P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...

    I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" (correct) spelled as "PENTRATION" (incorrect) on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).

    So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!

    (Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)

    Doing so, by posting that "$10,000 challenge" &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...

    It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally troubled 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing & there's NO QUESTION he's the one doing this spamming of nearly every posted article masquerading as myself...!

    ... apk