Slashdot Mirror
AMD Announces Fiji-based Radeon R9 Fury X, 'Project Quantum', Radeon 300 Series
MojoKid writes: Today AMD announced new graphics solutions ranging from the bottom to the top ($99 on up to $649). First up is the new range of R7 300 Series cards that is aimed squarely at gamers AMD says are typically running at 1080p. For gamers that want a little bit more power, there's the new R9 300 Series (think of them as R9 280s with higher clocks and 8GB of memory). Finally, AMD unveiled its Fiji graphics cards that feature onboard High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), offering 3x the performance-per-watt of GDDR5. Fiji has 1.5x the performance-per-watt of the R9 290X, and was built with a focus on 4K gaming. The chip itself features 4096 stream processors and is comprised of 8.9 billion transistors. It has a graphics core clock of 1050MHz and is rated at 8.6 TFLOPs. AMD says there will also be plenty of overhead for overclocking. Finally, AMD also took the opportunity to showcase its "Project Quantum," which is a small form-factor PC that manages to cram two Fiji GPUs inside. The processor, GPUs, and all other hardware are incorporated into the bottom of the chassis, while the cooling solution is built into the top of the case.
But is it powerful enough to run the Windows 10 Minesweeper game?! http://wscont1.apps.microsoft....
Seriously, no joke. The Win10 version of games are horribly resource hungry for fuck knows what reason. In the time it took to just load Minesweeper on the Win 10 tech preview, I loaded up a web browser, played an entire game of mines in it, closed the browser, came back, and it was STILL loading.
I originally played Minesweeper in Windows 3.1 on a 386sx 16MHz. I'm now on a 3GHz quad-core. On raw cycle processing power alone, that is literally 1,000 the speed (this is before accounting for enhancements to the architecture over the past 20 years). And yet the game struggles on modern hardware!? If this isn't the definition of bloat, I don't know what is!
Oh, don't misunderstand me ... I know you could do more with this video card than you could with ... well, all the technology in 1981.
I have always joked 1GB of iron core memory would knock the Earth out of orbit.
I remember things measured in kilohertz and megahertz, and kilobytes, and megabytes.
And my poor little monkey brain looks at the specs for those things and they're just beyond what I can wrap my head around. I feel like a caveman looking at a CNC machine when I see some of these things.
My inner gear head feels old, and conspicuously lacking in opposable thumbs. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And I say this as a lifelong nVidia card buyer (first card was a Canopus Spectra Riva TNT2, back in the day).