The Midaged Gamer Report for 4-26-2013
This Week:
A real AMD 7990 launches but the drivers still stink, The next Xbox and Windows 8?
I'm going for quality, not quantity this week so let's see
where the train goes...
Let me start by apologizing if this next part bores you but
you're going to need some background to understand why the launch of the AMD
7990 is so disappointing.
Somewhere back around December 2011 we got the first hint of
a dua lGPU powerhouse based on AMD's Southern Islands platform. The original launch date was supposed to be
the first quarter of 2012 but that didn't happen. Four months later Nvidia beat AMD to the punch
by announcing the Dual GPU 690 which had 2 of Nvidia's GK104 GPU's (the same as
the GTX 680). The only response from AMD
was a missed 7990 reveal at the 2012 Computex and subsequent delay moving the
forecasted launch to late August of 2012.
It wasn't till October of last year that we finally saw a
dual GPU product announcement bearing the 7990 moniker but it was not based on any reference design from AMD but
rather something Powercolor had designed themselves. Apparently board partners
had gotten tired of waiting around for something to fit into the void the 7990 was
leaving.
ASUS and Powercolor didn't wait for AMD's blessing, however,
with Powercolor using the 7990 label on their first dual GPU card without
complaint from AMD. Powercolor's
subsequent offering, the Devil 13 and Asus' Ares 2 made no mention of the 7990
on their packaging. That only fed the rumors
that there would be no official AMD Dual GPU offering to compete with Nvidia's
690. That left the AMD faithful
wondering if they'd have to wait till AMD's next generation for a
"real" dual GPU card to battle Nvidia.
All those rumors were finally put to rest this week but is
it too little too late?
AMD calls their new 7990, Malta. It's based on dual 28nm process 7970's, has 8.6
Billion transistors (2x4.3bil.), 6GB (3GBx2)
or DDR5, 384bit memory bus (x2), on a single PCB design. The card takes 2 8 pin PCI-E power plugs and
promises 576GB/sec memory bandwidth and 4096 Stream processors (2x2048 per GPU). Sounds good until you realize that all those
(x2's) are very reliant on software to make the real magic happen.
The 7990 designation continues with the new reference design
but AMD is quick to point out that this is the official 7990 where previous
partner produced cards were not. That's not
the whole story, however. The 7990 is
basically just another dual GPU stuck on a single PCB running in
crossfire. Really, there's no difference
from two cross-fired 7970's aside from freeing up a slot and a couple of power
plugs.
The real story, however, has nothing to do with hardware. It's the Achilles heel of AMD GPU's for the
past 2 generations of their video cards.
That being, the drivers. From
PCPer's new performance rating system called Frame Rating we see that new
hardware still can't fix flaky drivers.
The 7990 is still hampered by deficiencies in the drivers
when using Crossfire even if both GPU's are on the same PCB. That means the problems with runt frames and
erratic multi-GPU performance continue.
AMD has tried to address the issue with not one but two beta drivers
with the latest given only to PCPer appearing to help but not eliminate
crossfire performance issues.
At a $1000 price point the performance deficit caused by
AMD's continually sloppy driver development could push buyers straight into
Nvidia's 690 and Titan GPU's. That goes
double when you consider buyers have been waiting for a year for a card that is
currently not a real competitor to Nvidia's high end offerings. At this point PCPer has what amounts to a
prototype driver that could be the foundation to finally rid AMD of its
crossfire driver curse but you won't see it till midsummer. If you
can wait that long at least you can take advantage of a huge 8 game bundle AMD's offering with the 7990 including titles like Bioshock
Infinite, Tomb Raider and Crysis 3
Ok, enough about that...
We finally have a date for the announcement of the next
Xbox. Since the February announcement of
the PS4 (still bummed it's not called Orbis) Xbox fans have had to listen to their Playstation
buddies go on and on about the PS4. The only information an Xbox fan got came from
a former Microsoft creative director's bad attitude.
That was, until this week's announcement
of a special XBOX event to be broadcast live on Xbox.com, Xbox Live and Spike
TV (in the U.S.) at 10AM May 21st.
Great, so the Xbox faithful finally get some credible news but
wait! There's still time to spread around some unofficial rumors so here we
go...
Of course the obligatory parade of Triple-A titles will be
announced but new this week are some third-party affirmations about the console coming from the person of one Paul Thurrott. For the uninitiated Thurott is a well
respected tech blogger and author who runs winsupersite.com
as well as hosting the weekly "Windows Weekly"
podcast on the TWIT network that airs every Thursday. Thurott has connections within Microsoft and
has been writing about the company and its products for decades.
Oh yeah, and he's a real big Call of Duty fan. So there's that grain of salt...
I like Paul, in fact he's known to pull no punches when
Microsoft does wrong and was no fan of the reign of Steven Sinofsky. Apparently the feeling was mutual as he
frequently found himself snubbed by the former Microsoft exec. Why that's important will become clear in a
second but first the aforementioned "salt"
Thurott is on record as saying that Windows Vista wasn't that bad of an operating system.
To which I say, you're delusional Paul. Any operating system that can turn the
performance of a Core I7 into an Athlon 64 is bad. If Apple would have embraced
"Hackintosh" users in 2006 I'm convinced Microsoft would've been
reduced to the market share of Linux because of Vista.
So there's that but I digress...
The real news is that he's managed to confirm that the next
Xbox will launch in early November, will not be backward compatible with the Xbox 360
and will cost $500. If that price is too
steep you can get it for $300 if you agree to pay $10 a month (USD) over the
next 2 years for an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
The new Xbox will contain an Blu-Ray drive and its operating
system will be running...
Yes friends and neighbors, you can finally rest assured that
Windows 8 is indeed the one platform to rule them all in the Windows
world.
Windows 8 core is the most basic version of Windows and
while it doesn't support virtualization it does support the tiled (Modern or
Metro) interface, has a desktop and supports most of the standard Windows
applications. You can bet it will be heavily modified but at
its "core"(pun intended) you've got a Windows PC.
Thurott also claims that the next Xbox will indeed be
required to have an active Internet connection but he qualifies that with the
statement that it "isn't as Draconian as many seem to believe." Although he hasn't gone into detail on
exactly what that means.
My guess (and that's all it is) is that the Windows 8 core
OS that the new Xbox runs on will be subject to the same security updates and
patches as any other Windows install.
That means all those new Xbox owners are going to learn the phrase,
"Patch Tuesday"
Windows 8 is more secure and better performing than Windows
7 but I 'm not so sure I'd want to run a console with it. It's still just a console after all.
That and I'm wondering if Microsoft thinks there's going to
be a bunch of 80" touch screen TV's flooding the market or will we all be flailing
our arms at a Kinect sensor to launch a game.
The only other option is to navigate the "tiles" with a game
controller which to be frank would profoundly "suck."
The "Always On" thing bugs me though. It's a fact of life that anyone with a PC or
Tablet these days is forced to lose hours of their lives to updates. Thing is, I can still use my PC and current
consoles without always having to be connected to the Internet.
May 21st will be interesting.
That's it for this week and I've gone on for almost 1500
words so you must be asleep by now.
Remember, next week is the big monthly wrap up!
I'm out.
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