Humbug

Give it a shot though, it may still be fixed if it shares a common root cause with one of the other similar use cases they fixed.

Looks like they pulled everyone on the software team away from performance and feature work for a few weeks and said just focus on bugs.

It's been an interesting few months for the Radeon Technologies group. Their performance midrange Navi graphics cards have been selling well (source) helped by AMD's resurgent brand name thanks to the CPU division. However the last couple of months has also seen the reputation of AMD's driver team go up in flames with many users complaining of black screen issues particularly when using multi-monitor setups. This downturn in their driver quality comes at a time when the company is making good profits, expanding R&D and software teams and has more resources at it's disposal than recent memory. Ironically in the last 8 years during much of which AMD was in a dicey financial situation they had developed a good reputation for the quality of their drivers both in terms of stability and long term support. The situation came to a head with major tech outlets like Gamer's Nexus complaining about persistent bugs, and even Hardware Unboxed hesitating to recommend some mainstream AMD GPUs despite them having better performance than Nvidia. AMD now realizes that this situation could ruin RTG's reputation undoing years of hard work on the driver side and hurting their sales for years to come. Nvidia will be hoping this storm continues as it has the potential to ruin the upcoming launch of big Navi. The Adrenalin Edition 20.2.2 release is packed to the brim with bug fixes, rather than performance or feature improvements. This is AMD's attempt to get on top of things. https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-20-2-2

Sadly AMD has realized that they have limited 7nm dies so when it comes to the big die sized high end products they can make much more money selling them as Epyc and Threadripper CPUs.... rather than gaming GPUs which need to priced competitively with geforce. Hopefully in 2020 as 7nm capacity increases AMD will no longer have to choose between markets.

Well apparently AMD is announcing RDNA 2.0 GPUs next month at CES. Hopefully those are high end parts.

I don't think they are convinced that low end is the way to go. I think they have limited 7nm supply from TSMC and have decided that they can make much more money if they use those dies to product Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc. Even amongst CPUs they are prioritizing Epyc, then Threadripper, so the supply of bigger Ryzen chips is also not enough to cater to the demand. Hopefully within the next few months they will get ample supply and no longer have to choose between CPU and GPU markets. They have done most of the hard work creating RDNA, which is so much better than GCN for gaming, it would be a shame to not produce high end chips. LOL Going by AMD's recent pattern they will match the 2080ti once Nvidia launches the 3080ti. ?

It seems like now AMD is making money on CPUs and they want to keep most of their limited 7nm supply for CPUs. GPUs aren't as lucrative for them. I too wanted them to start making high end RDNA GPUs in 2019 but it seems like the announcement has got pushed to January 2020 CES. They have been increasing their R&D budget too as they are profitable now. Hopefully as 7nm ramps up next year to higher volumes we can get back to the days when they offered an entire line up from low end to high end on the same base architecture. Their gaming offerings are too fragmented now between Polaris, Vega, Navi. Same with the naming schemes, they need to unify everything and send a clear message to buyers- this is what we offer, something for every price range. It's a mess right now.

Still use mine. I love the feature where you can easily browse between different community made configurations from in-game using the steam overlay. It's a clever solution to bridge the gap between the fact that it's the most customizable controller and the fact that most people just want to jump in and play without tinkering themselves. Hope they make a V2.

I didn't know that stuff like this was still happening; AMD CPUs being detected via the vendor ID and then suboptimal methods being used.

It's not a demo. It will be a proper feature length game. Not the Vive in particular. Valve wants a healthy VR headset and games ecosystem around Steam. The better PC VR does in general the better for Valve. Most of their money is via Steam and the VR ecosystem is another innovation to drive that forward.

Vulkan and DX12 have explicit multi-GPU support in the API. It's different from crossfire and SLI. The game developer has to specifically program for it to spread the load across multiple graphics chips.

Update - 10/11/2019 - turn on async compute for Vulkan Some users including hardware unboxed had noticed some hitching/stuttering under vulkan. It seems like Rockstar had forgotten to turn async compute on. It needs to be manually enabled in the config files and makes the frametimes smoother. This should help for GCN, RDNA and possibly even Turing. open the below file Documents\Rockstar games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings\system.xml look for the below line <asynComputeEnabled value "false" /> Change it to true and save

The other possibility is that since this game was built from the ground up as a modern graphics API game with a programming paradigm closer to vulkan / dx12 and no traditional dx11 backend; that RDNA, Turing and GCN are just better equipped at an architectural level than pascal is.

I guess AMD is now in a position where they can charge more. They have delivered multiple consecutive generations of good CPUs now, so their brand value and mindshare has increased. AMD now knows that they have to make as money as possible in the next two years while Intel is still getting their shit together.

The question is- For those of you who have played it on PC- is it the best looking game to date technically? Hard to judge from compressed online videos and static screenshots, games always look better in person. If the graphics horsepower has been put to good efficient use then it's very justified IMO.

Ya, even in the guru3d comments under this article there are lots of people accusing nvidia of gimping. I think many people don't understand that what is going on is not active gimping, it is just that the nvidia software engineers who have limited time are spending their manhours trying to make Turing as fast as possible in the latest AAA games. Older generations don't get the same attention because they are not trying to convince people to buy them anymore, that doesn't mean they are gimped or intentionally slowed down- just less optimized.

Update - 6/11/2019 Guru3d has posted their recommended settings in order to optimize performance with minimal visual loss. Most settings changed to high, texture quality maintained at Ultra, graphics API changed to Vulkan.

Some people seem to be having better luck on DX12 and some on Vulkan with this game. Not sure why. Best to try it yourself on your individual rig and see which is smoother.

These are mobile APU chips, based on Zen2. The same technology in desktop Ryzen 3xxx series. It will just be called 4xxx series, but it is not Zen3.

They need to make sure that the laptop vendors are designing and promoting products based on Ryzen APUs. So far what they do is just take an Intel laptop, and for very few models just give a token option of an AMD chip. Whereas everything in the laptop from the cooling, to the power management, form factor etc was designed around Intel.

Intel has a stranglehold on the laptop market. So far as AMD executes their recovery they have been more focused on areas that give them better margins. Laptops chips are low margin but very high volume. Intel has much stronger working relationships with all the laptop vendors and they design their products around Intel parts. Not easy for AMD to break that, having a superior CPU alone is not enough.