AMD Unveils Preliminary Radeon HD 8000M Series Mobile GPU Details 51
MojoKid writes "AMD has just released some preliminary information regarding the company's upcoming Radeon HD 8000M series of mobile GPUs. Based on the naming convention alone, it may obvious that the Radeon HD 8000M series is AMD's second generation of products featuring the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, which debuted in the Radeon HD 7000 series. Like its predecessors, the Radeon HD 8000M series targets gamers with full DirectX 11.1 support and improved gaming performance over the previous-gen, but the architecture also lends itself to GPU compute applications as well. The Radeon HD 8500M sports 384 Stream Processors with an Engine Clock up to 650MHz. Memory clocks will vary based on the use of GDDR3 or GDDR5 memory. The Radeon HD 8600M is essentially the same, but with a slightly higher Engine Clock up to 775MHz. The Radeon HD 8700M is also based on the same GPU, but will be clocked at up to 850MHz, for a further increase in performance over the 8600M. The Radeon HD 8800M series, however, is based on a larger, more powerful chip and will sport 640 Stream Processors with an engine clock of up to 700MHz. GDDR5 memory will be used exclusively with 8800M, at speeds up to 1125MHz. It will be interesting to see how these new GPUs stack up versus NVIDIA's latest GeForce 600M series of mobile chips."
Power specs? (Score:1, Interesting)
Honestly, that's sort of 50% of why the 600 series is such a badass in the mobile market: because it has a pretty damned low power draw and still manages to issue forth a lot of power. I'm seeing them show up in ultrabooks, for god's sake. Can AMD really bring the heat on this?
Re:Power consumption (Score:4, Interesting)
Game graphics are already "good enough" though. Good enough doesn't mean "photorealistic" in all cases. Photorealism ruins the feel of certain types of games - for example I preferred the style of GTA III to GTA IV. I think Saints Row 3 gets a nice balance between the two. Keeping slightly cartoon-ish characters while making the environment more realistic. Especially in fantasy games.
For racing games and other vehicle simulators etc we already basically have photorealism in the models and lighting. It's little details like camera shake help to make things feel more realistic, and I'd say they're more important details than getting the last few percentage points towards perfect reflections and particle physics (though those are nice too).
It's people who buy games based on graphics that are letting gaming become such a formulaic experience these days. What isn't "good enough" these days is how publishers take a good idea/series and plow the shit out of it. The guitar hero/rock band games were great fun, but they oversaturated the market. Assassin's Creed 1 was okay. 2 was spectacular, Brotherhood even better. But then they brought out Revelations which didn't add much at all or have a particularly involving story, and even AC3 felt a bit rushed IMO. The graphics in all of these games are definitely good enough to get the job done. It's the gameplay that is important.
Sigh. Rant over..