Video Cards

[Mercutio]

It looks to me like the GPU is momentarily spiking to very high utilization if I'm doing subject sharpen/face detection/noise removal. It happens if I feed even one image to Topaz AI and stays at nearly full load until it runs out of images to process. This might be an AMD driver thing; I don't remember my 2080 doing that, but it's also not obeying the fan curve I set in MSI Afterburner.

I did think I was going to have to mod some case fans but no, it turns out that I am not the first person to want to put PWM fans on a GPU and there's a ready made adapter, so the mod will actually be pretty easy.

 

[ddrueding]

If fan speed is spiking that quickly, it needs to be firmware or software driven, no thermocouple would register in time.

 

[Mercutio]

Turns out Battlemage actually adds more advanced chroma support compared to Arc. 12-bit HEVC 444 is something you normally only find on cine cameras, not consumer mirrorless models, but it's there on the spec sheet. Sweet.

 

[ddrueding]

The reviews were actually quite good, and it seems the drivers are making considerable progress. If I were shopping for cards in that price range it would be a strong contender.

 

[sedrosken]

Color me impressed. I'm not about to buy another one considering how I got turned out on Alchemist, but maybe these driver improvements will migrate their way back.

 

[fb]

I ordered a B580 for the son. IIt will join a 11700 (maybe K) and 32 GB RAM. And he uses a 1080 monitor, so it should be enough.

 

[Mercutio]

As far as I can tell, those cards are sold out EVERYWHERE.

Apparently the next big news is the next generation Ryzen Pro AI Max nonsense-whatever APUs, which supposedly exceed a discrete mobile RTX 4060 in overall performance. I guess if there's one good thing about planet-killing AI energy demands, it's that everyone is finally serious about putting big boy graphics on everything.

 

[ddrueding]

Awesome. Good integrated graphics was what excited me most about Intel doing the GPU thing.

 

[fb]

The card is in the mail, perhaps swedes are a bit slower or they went after the Asrock and Sparkles, which seem to have better cooling and so on.

It would be really nice if Intel levelled up on the integrated GPUs. Perhaps in a generation or two? (With the AI-stuff beeing so popular and all?)

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently, RDNA 4 GPUs are directly taking the literal name scheme from nVidia, with the new top end being called 9070XT being on par with the nVidia 4070TI. I suppose it will make comparison easier. The top end card is supposed to cost $650, which seems pretty reasonable since we're not talking about $1000+ cards.

 

[Mercutio]

^on par for ray tracing performance, apparently. Leakers are also saying that the third-fastest SKU should have 17% less power consumption than the 7800XT, which sounds to me like a pretty modest dual slot/dual fan card rather than some 2.5 slot, three fan monster.