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AMD silently nerfing the performance of older GCN cards

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AMD has disabled Async Compute for the original GCN cards (7xxx series and some 2xx series) ever since September in driver version 16.9.2.

 

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It appears AMD disabled Async Compute on GCN 1.0 hardware (Southern Islands based GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series) starting with Crimson 16.9.2 drivers. With the newer drivers on one of these older cards it has been discovered that there is no longer support for asynchronous-compute. This is hurting performance on the older cards in DirectX 12 game titles that support Async-Compute. Some recent game titles like Total War Hammer, Gears of War 4 and Ashes of the Singularity can benefit from async-compute, so why would AMD disable such a feature on their first-generation GCN architecture?

 

It seems that this change was done intentionally-

 

Quote

One AMD community member noticed that Total War: Warhammer and Rise of The Tomb Raider weren’t supporting Async compute on GCN 1.0 and an AMD employee told him to ask game developers instead. He also included patch notes that show DirectX 12 Asynchronous Compute was added for AMD GCN 1.1 GPUs, but the original poster already knew that. Ouch.

My thoughts on this is that it really isn't a big deal because Async Compute isn't all that important or beneficial for a better graphic experience. Thoughts?

 

Source:

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-disabled-async-compute-older-gcn-1-0-video-cards_188713

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see AMD, the problem here is NVIDIA gets to pull this shit becuase they are the market leader. 

though there's more to this than the surface value, it's not like where NVIDIA gimped 7xx series when 9xx series came out like on witcher 3. 

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GCN 1 cards were showing basically no benefit from it. I still don't know if I agree with turning it off though.

4 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Does that explain Forza Horizon on the R9 390?

insert conspiracy theory

 

If this is actually true, who's the bad guy now?

390 is GCN 2 and not affected by this. To this day, GCN 2 cards have been showing the most gains from async compute.

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5 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Does that explain Forza Horizon on the R9 390?

insert conspiracy theory

 

If this is actually true, who's the bad guy now?

The good: Nvidia

The bad: AMD

The ugly: Intel

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1 minute ago, ivan134 said:

GCN 1 cards were showing basically no benefit from it. I still don't know if I agree with turning it off though.

390 is GCN 2 and not affected by this. To this day, GCN 2 cards have been showing the most gains from async compute.

I thought the R9 390 was GCN 1.1?

I know the R9 285/380, R9 Fury, X, Nano, and Radeon Pro Duo are GCN 1.2, so idk.

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1 minute ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I thought the R9 390 was GCN 1.1?

I know the R9 285/380, R9 Fury, X, Nano, and Radeon Pro Duo are GCN 1.2, so idk.

GCN 1.x is not officially from AMD. AFAIK, Anandtech started that. Hawaii and 7790 are GCN 2. Tonga and Fiji are GCN 3.

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9 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

GCN 1.x is not officially from AMD. AFAIK, Anandtech started that. Hawaii and 7790 are GCN 2. Tonga and Fiji are GCN 3.

cool

I used to be quite active here.

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1 minute ago, Kobathor said:

Hawaii is GCN 2? So I'm safe?? YAY

I genuinely thought the 7970/7950 cards were the first GCN cards. But I've never researched it, so.

7970/7950 are not Hawaii. Yea they were the 1st GCN cards. 290/290x are Hawaii. The only GCN 2 card from the 7000 series iirc, is the 7790.

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11 minutes ago, Repost said:

It seems that this change was done intentionally

it's absolutely done intentionally

there are far more Radeon HD7xxx series owners than they are RX4xx series

 

check STEAM HW Survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

  • HD 7900 Series - 1.24%
  • HD 7700 Series - 1.13%
  • HD 8800 Series - 1.10%
  • HD 7800 Series - 0.91%
  • R7 Graphics - 0.75%
  • R5 Graphics - 0.70%
  • HD 8500 Series - 0.62%
  • R9 200 Series - 0.61%
  • R9 380 Series - 0.56%
  • HD 5450 - 0.52%
  • HD 8470D - 0.51%
  • Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series - 0.51%
  • R9 390 Series - 0.50%
  • HD 5700 Series - 0.43%
  • HD 6800 Series - 0.42%
  • R7 200 Series - 0.38%
  • HD 6670 - 0.38%
  • Radeon RX 480 - 0.37%
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FFS! >:(

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4 minutes ago, Kobathor said:

Hawaii is GCN 2? So I'm safe?? YAY

I genuinely thought the 7970/7950 cards were the first GCN cards. But I've never researched it, so.

So no, you're not safe, but your card was no benefiting with it on. You're not missing anything.

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17 minutes ago, Repost said:

My thoughts on this is that it really isn't a big deal because Async Compute isn't all that important or beneficial for a better graphic experience. Thoughts?

Had this been Nvidia, I would see tons of torches and pitchforks on this forum.

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12 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

see AMD, the problem here is NVIDIA gets to pull this shit becuase they are the market leader. 

though there's more to this than the surface value, it's not like where NVIDIA gimped 7xx series when 9xx series came out like on witcher 3. 

Again. No proof of that. Only if by "gimped" you mean slowed driver support then yes. But thats too be expected when you completely change an architecture and how the GPU renders.

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On the other side I'm thinking "how much of a performance benefit do old cards see and is the absolute performance after the fact even worth writing about?"

 

For instance, if a GCN 1.0 card without Async Compute gets 16 FPS and with ASync Compute gets 25 FPS, it's still a 50% increase in performance, but would you still care?

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Has anybody investigated on whether this actually makes any difference in performance? Legacy drivers can still be obtained for testing.

Don't ask to ask, just ask... please 🤨

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11 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

see AMD, the problem here is NVIDIA gets to pull this shit becuase they are the market leader. 

though there's more to this than the surface value, it's not like where NVIDIA gimped 7xx series when 9xx series came out like on witcher 3. 

Wait what? They didn't gimp those cards. They had tessellation set too damn high for hairworks, and even then they clearly said the tessellation performance of the 900 series was dramatically better than the 700 series.

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4 minutes ago, zMeul said:

And like I said, GCN 1.x was started by Anandtech. GCN 1.x cards are actually GCN 2. I realized that when AMD called Polaris GCN 4. The article you just linked proves where GCN 1.x started.

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2 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

7970/7950 are not Hawaii. Yea they were the 1st GCN cards. 290/290x are Hawaii. The only GCN 2 card from the 7000 series iirc, is the 7790.

lol i knew that

edits my post away

I used to be quite active here.

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11 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

7970/7950 are not Hawaii. Yea they were the 1st GCN cards. 290/290x are Hawaii. The only GCN 2 card from the 7000 series iirc, is the 7790.

So my AMD 7950 will be affected? @Dan Castellaneta

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If I remember right wasnt there a difference between gcn 1.0 and 1.1 that limited it to some features.

 

Edit: Yes

 

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7389

 

Quote

1. New Compute Unit instructions, including FLAT instructions for HSA memory model compliance
2. Full Address Translation Cache implementation, which allows both data and code to/from CUs to be addressed directly with the process address space (no pinning restriction), apart from the GPU's own virtual address spaces. This has to be backed by PCIe ATS 1.1, which is implemented by AMD in IOMMUv2.
3. Ability to access the coherent, system address space directly. In earlier architectures, that space can only be accessed after the particular region needed is mapped into GPU's virtual address space and with no coherency guarantees.

 

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13 minutes ago, Abdul201588 said:

So my AMD 7950 will be affected? 

Yes and no.

Yes, it's turned off.

No, you weren't benefiting from it in the 1st place.

 

I don't have the technical know-how to know what the drawbacks, if any, are to having it on with no benefits. It'd be great if AMD gives us more info.

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23 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

On the other side I'm thinking "how much of a performance benefit do old cards see and is the absolute performance after the fact even worth writing about?"

 

For instance, if a GCN 1.0 card without Async Compute gets 16 FPS and with ASync Compute gets 25 FPS, it's still a 50% increase in performance, but would you still care?

16 and 25 fps is a big differne

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