Friday, April 26, 2013

A real AMD 7990, next Xbox and Windows 8?




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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