http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
Im thinking of the 1+1 config.

>Richard Huddy, thank you for the blog and clarifying many things for me and others.

You’re welcome – thanks for taking the time to read my blog.

>Will DirectX be the end of Stream vs CUDA question for people who want to use a video card not just for games but for other applications or we will have to wait for OpenCL or something?

Well, yes, I think it will be the end of proprietary APIs etc (so, yes, that includes CUDA). There’s simply no good reason to use a proprietary API which locks you in to one vendor’s hardware when there’s a good solid well supported alternative based upon open standards.

>Will the new generation of GPU be more power hungry, heat up to 100+ C, and make the cooler sound like a turbo jet?

No. If you want you’ll be able to choose a card which consumes less power and runs quieter than what you presently have. But that decision is always a trade-off where you decide how much horse-power you want and how noisy or power-hungry you’re willing to be. We give you the opportunity to choose, and the actual choice is yours…

>Why can’t AMD/ATI enable all DirectX11 features in its 4800 or even earlier cards by updating BIOS and/or drivers?

That’s simple. DirectX 11 has capabilities (like “DX11 Tessellation” and “Shader Model 5″) which simply aren’t supported by our previous hardware. There’s no way to fake these things up in the driver – you need real DirectX 11 hardware to get these capabilities.

>If even latest AMD/ATI video cards do not fully support DirectX 11 it does not make sense to buy a new expensive card now because as soon as “DirectX 11 compliant” video cards appear on the market the price of older (now latest) cards will dramatically drop as most folks will be looking for DirectX 11 card. Even though it will take a long time for software to adopt DirectX 11 everybody will be looking for “future proof” hardware.

Well, again, that’s a choice you’re free to make. We’re offering some stunning value on our HD4800 series at present so those can be great choices, but, yes, if you want the world’s best experience on Windows 7 and DirectX 11 then you might do well to wait a little longer!

>I am in the process of building a new system for myself on i7 (sorry AMD) and wanted to buy a 4850 card (the primary purpose of the computer is HD video editing) with a quiet cooling system. But now spending $100+ for a new card feels like a waste. Anyway I will probably still go for 4850 as I am not a gamer and hope the video system performance will be sufficient for me for at least 3 years.

The HD4850 is a great choice – it’s what I use in my home machine. Great for games, very reasonable power and noise levels, and it supports DirectX 10.1 which helps with quite a few of the best games from 2009.

>I still have ATI All-in-Wonder card but it is an AGP card and useless for new platforms.

Agreed. For AGP users it’s a great card, but for most of us it’s a little dated now.

>Richard Huddy, thank you for the blog and clarifying many things for me and others.

You’re welcome. And my thanks to you for taking the time to put together some interesting questions on the subject…

Thanks,

RichardH

I guess I don’t think there’s much to drive you either way on the choice between OpenCL and DIrectX. If you’re coding in DirectX then DirectCompute is the obvious choice. If you’re running OpenGL or not using the graphics pipeline at all then you may prefer OpenCL.

For AMD we’re committed to supporting both of these open standards, and I’d positively encourage you to explore either option – which ever suits your needs best. But please don’t waste your time on proprietary standards – that’s just a dead-end when there are perfectly good standards with great support as an alternative.

RichardH

I personally made the switch from NVIDIA to ATI a little over 7 years ago and I agree that you and I both made the right choice. And when it comes to raising the bar on image quality you’ll find our new DirectX 11 hardware to be utterly awesome. I’ve been very impressed by both the numerous tech demos I’ve seen which show individual features off, and by teh games which are coming.

Indeed, if you like the quality of our pixels then you’ll love Eyefinity. Running 3 or more displays at the same time is soooooo sweet!

RichardH

Using a quad core CPU (which ever one you choose) will a good way to get great performance from DirectX11 games. But if you want the very best visual quality then you will also need DirectX 11 hardware.

i want to buy this card but recenty i heard about the new upcoming dx11 Ati/nvidia gpu’s.

Each time i buy a new card the next few months,Ati/nvidia always seem to release a new card.

my only wish is that ati & nvidia stop making new cards every 8-10 months.

i am a person who cant resist new Gpu’s and always see myself buying a new 1.

should i wait for the new cards to arrive for dx11 or should i go for the 4870×2 from ATi?

Great job ATI, I’m a fan for life!

Will DirectX be the end of Stream vs CUDA question for people who want to use a video card not just for games but for other applications or we will have to wait for OpenCL or something?
Will the new generation of GPU be more power hungry, heat up to 100+ C, and make the cooler sound like a turbo jet?
Why can’t AMD/ATI enable all DirectX11 features in its 4800 or even earlier cards by updating BIOS and/or drivers?

If even latest AMD/ATI video cards do not fully support DirectX 11 it does not make sense to buy a new expensive card now because as soon as “DirectX 11 compliant” video cards appear on the market the price of older (now latest) cards will dramatically drop as most folks will be looking for DirectX 11 card. Even though it will take a long time for software to adopt DirectX 11 everybody will be looking for “future proof” hardware.

I am in the process of building a new system for myself on i7 (sorry AMD) and wanted to buy a 4850 card (the primary purpose of the computer is HD video editing) with a quiet cooling system. But now spending $100+ for a new card feels like a waste. Anyway I will probably still go for 4850 as I am not a gamer and hope the video system performance will be sufficient for me for at least 3 years.
I still have ATI All-in-Wonder card but it is an AGP card and useless for new platforms.

And while we are at it, lets categorise all major graphics styles used in modern games and slam a commonly used, required standard for all the categories in order to make sure that we really get what we are promised and paying for.

Demos that i have seen so far about dx.11 are very compelling, but please do remember how it all turned out with dx.10 and its fantastic new graphical capabilities and performance boost it was supposed to offer. After all we have seen only tech-demos and sadly thats all they are.

Even if this new generation of gpu´s would manage to offer everything that engineers and marketing sections are promising for us, it does NOT mean that gamestudios around the globe would start to support it any better than dx.10 was/is supported right now.

All in all, i´m very sceptic about this until i see atleast couple of high end games hitting the shelfs and reaching high scores at reviews…Hopefully more people would do the same, theres no point in tossing out our money for anyone, despite how intriguing promises they make, atleast until we see some decent results. This way we wouldn´t support nonsense products sold solely based on fictional capabilities empty promises.

You mentioned that DX11 exposes the GPU at a more flexible level, should I read into this that DX11 is the preferred / optimal way to harness this power in non visual programming (computational fluid dynamics) and such – or is OpenCL still the way to go?

Triple buffering has been possible since at least DirectX 5 – but it tends to produce little or no real benefit in performance. Adding a single extra buffer over and above double buffering only helps when you have highly variable frame generation times (after all if the game engine can steadily run 1 frame ahead then it can probably 2 frames ahead, so the bottleneck must still be the GPU). Plus it uses up a large amount of extra memory.

The best analog for effective triple buffering is, I believe, CrossFire. By queueing up work for multiple GPUs you take a situation where the GPU was the bottleneck and aim to halve (or better) the workload.

For an enthusiast machine this is the ultimate solution! And I can tell you that CrossFire on DX11 hardware rocks!

Richard “7 of 5″ Huddy

So, the tesselation unit included in the 4xxx’s (and promoted to hell by AMD) basically does not, and never will, do anything? It’s more than a little annoying to hear this as someone who bought a 4870.

My HD4850 have tessellation 3.0, and it´s work´s in games DirectX 11?
It´s fair than tessellation works in HD3000 and HD4000 séries in DirectX 11, right?
I don´t By a new card for tessellation, but I have it!

Thanks

Thank you.

Well, I’m glad to hear that you share our enthusiasm for DirectX 11 – I genuinely believe that it’s going to invigorate PC gaming for quite a few reasons.

But, yes, if you need to buy a card now then you’ll have to get something from the current line-ups.

You mention a DirectX 10.1 card – and that’s the very best place to start. For over a year AMD has been shipping DirectX 10.1 hardware, and the latest range (the HD4000 series) is showing plenty of benefits to DirectX 10.1 over previous generations of DirectX.

If you buy a DirectX 10.1 card then you can certainly use it with Windows 7 or Windows Vista, and it’s great news that it can run things like the Compute Shader (technically it will “meet the CS4.1 spec”).

The stuff you’ll miss out on will be Compute Shader 5.0, Tessellation and any of the other DX11-specific features which are based on the extended functionality of DIrectX 11.

The main gain that you’ll get on that card will be from using the DirectX 11 runtime (from Microsoft) and DirectX 11 drivers (from AMD). When you do that (which requires a DirectX 11 game) then you can often expect to see significant benefits in frame rates because those games will be designed to use the CPU more efficiently.

Maybe here I should summarize?

If you plan to play games on Windows XP then you can pretty safely stick with the DirectX 10.1 hardware.

If you are a serious PC enthusiast like me and you plan to replace your card within 6 months or so then buying a high-end DirectX 10.1 card now makes good sense. I recommend the HD4890 which is perfect for high resolution full-on gaming. It’s the very pinnacle of gaming now and even by early 2010 it’ll still make for an awesome system.

If you want to enjoy the very best from DirectX 11 games as soon as they arrive then you will have to switch to a DirectX 11 card at that time. [You might even consider upgrading to CrossFire for the interim to keep your system fully charged...]

And for those sceptics who are convinced that I’m a “blue eyed maketing guy” I’d suggest that the HD4890 is the best purchase. If you think that DIrectX 11 is all just hype then sit back and enjoy the terrific goodness that’s in our current high end GPUs. [But, (a) I don't have blue eyes, (b) I'm not a marketing type, I'm a techie at heart, and (c) DirectX 11 games really will arrive this year, and they really will look astonishingly real. ]

RichardH

AMD has made a public statement that we’ll deliver DX11 graphics into the market this year (2009).

Technically I’m probably not suppoosed to clarify that further, but I’ll go out on a limb and say there’s no way that means December 31st.

This transition is going to be one of the 4 most important transitions in graphics this decade (in 2002 we introduced DX9, 2004 saw PCIe, 2006 DX10 and now in 2009 we get DX11). We’re laser-focussed on hitting this transition as well as any company possibly could.

RichardH

Thanks,