AMD brought us to their suite at CES 2017 to show us a whole lot of incredibly cool things.
So I've got two demos behind me, one of which is 4 Radeon Pro SSG graphics cards.
So these are the ones with the -like- one terabyte of -sort of- SSD cache on them,
which they've got running in RAID for 4 terabytes.
They're working with a 200GB data set and they are rendering a photorealistic 4k image
in damn near real-time.
And to put it in perspective a top-end workstation working with that would be doing like
one frame every five seconds.
But I know most of you guys are not into photorealistic image rendering as much as you're into gaming
and that's where this demo comes in.
This right here is Doom at 4K ultra settings, I actually had to use some console commands in order to do it
because they disabled escape, but they're like "yes, we are running ultra settings",
and it turns out it is indeed true, TSAA X8, 3840 by 2160.
Vulcan Ultra it is the real deal right here running at rock-solid over 60 FPS on an undisclosed named Vega GPU
So, there's four real pillars for VEGA.
There's the new cache architecture which allows games to start using gigabytes or even terabyte scale data sets.
There's the new Geometry pipeline which allows for an incredible number of polygons
There's the new compute engine which they're calling NCU for next compute unit
So that's pretty cool.
But basically 16-bit data types are becoming super important for HDR in particular
Which is going to be one of the next big image quality improvements in gaming.
And finally there's a new pixel engine.
So they're calling it the draw stream binning rasterizer.
This cuts down on unnecessary memory fetches.
So, say for example in a game like Doom, normally the way the game is designed you would actually waste
memory bandwidth drawing stuff that's behind the rocket launcher.
That is not going to be the case with this new approach.
And it won't require games to be rewritten either. Which is pretty freaking cool.
So, they're not discussing price point.
They're not discussing when it's shipping other than sometime in the first half of 2017
but what they did let me do is they did let me hold one which is pretty freakin amazing and
they have also allowed us to take the side panel off of the machine,
giving us our first look at running operating Ryzen and VEGA hardware working together.
Now, I want to make it very very abundantly clear that the finished design will not have gaffer tape on it
That is there so that AMD doesn't have all the - you know - bathroom engineers sitting on the can
with their calculators on their phones, figuring out things like power draw,
for a product that is potentially up to six months away.
Because it's not done yet.
As if the - you know - 3" - you know - EP extension on the back with a USB3 port on it
wasn't enough of an indication.
On that subject...
... a Usb 3 port on the inside of a graphics card,
I think I'm gonna have to bring in an expert to explain to me: "Why exactly, we need one of those?"
and "what AMD is doing over here?".
So here he is.
The man himself, the dropper of GPUs here.
I'm gonna put that in your pocket for safekeeping, I'm not gonna let you hold it.
Tell me about this.
So, Linus this is the stuff that I'm most excited about.
On the GPU there are billions of transistors on the chip that you just put in my pocket
But this kind of... this - this - this thing is... I'm super excited about... this is only on engineering cards, right?
This is not... you're not going to see it on a product, okay?
And that's so cool.
I think I'll make a special edition for you and for me like we'll make two cards, okay?
I love that thing, but what this does is it gives every engineer in the company the
ability to monitor all the signals.
Most importantly all power and electrical signals coming out of the CPU, remotely, with no overhead.
Now, every engineer including the guys who test games, the Q/A guys, everybody inside Amd that has a Vega
can see what's going on at the detail level.
That's kind of what exactly...
Is this in response to some of the criticism with Polaris's power sort of .. you know dropping.
We definitely... you know... want to get better at our... you know... power efficiency.
Every generation, we're putting money where our mouth is, right?
It's overkill solution.
It's not, I mean, I think this is really really cool because I...
especially software engineers, now they can see what impact they're having on power,
in their... you know... in their whatever machine that... you know... they put a Vega.
And so that's kind of... you know... really cool, kind of... you know... attachment
I didn't expect us to be talking about that.
You know... I expected us to be talking about... all the the full cool new architectural features and...
And our battery died that was awkward.
But what's not awkward is this Demo which is pretty freakin' impressive.
So huge thanks to Roger for telling us about the power monitoring.
Huge thanks to AMD for allowing us to be down here at CES 2017.
Huge thanks to you for watching and don't forget to subscribe for more great videos from CES 2017.