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AMD Reveals Radeon Sky Series For Cloud Gaming, Previews Radeon HD 7990
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."
how many megahashes do they produce?
I think it means having a backend for a game consisting of distributed computing resources.
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
They already announced it.
It is called NVIDIA GRID.
GRID: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html
It finally happened, add-in graphics cards are bigger than the rest of the computer.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
and cost 33% more...
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How is the pci-e bus setup on the dual-GPU cards?.
each GPU get's 8 lanes? pci-e switch? dual core?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?