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Late last week word began circulating that AMD would be dropping driver support for their DX10 generation GPUS – HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 – based on a Phoronix article discussing the future of driver support for those GPUs under Linux. As Phoronix correctly observed, AMD tends to drop support for a GPU under Linux and Windows simultaneously, so there was reason to believe that a similar retirement would indeed be coming for AMD’s DX10 GPUs under Windows.

Today AMD put out a statement clarifying the future of driver support for their DX10 GPUs, and as it turns out Phoronix was correct.

Starting with Catalyst 12.5 (May’s Catalyst release), AMD will be moving the HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 series from mainstream to legacy status. This means that those products will move from receiving monthly driver updates to quarterly driver updates, and at the same time AMD will shift away from working on further performance improvements and new features for those cards, and instead working solely on bug fixes and other critical updates. AMD believes they’ve gotten all they’re going to get from their DX10 GPUs from a performance standpoint, so now their focus is going to be on any driver bugs that may crop up with future games.

As you may recall, this is the same legacy driver development model that AMD moved their DX9 GPUs to back in 2009, when Catalyst 9.3 was the last mainstream driver to support those GPUs. If that transition is any kind of reliable guidance, that means we should expect another year of driver updates for AMD’s DX10 GPUs. Their last driver release for those GPUs was 10.2 back in February of 2010, roughly a year after they moved those GPUs to legacy status. With that said, given the slowing pace of graphics API development – we’re not even to Direct3D 11.1 yet – I wouldn’t be surprised (or at least will be hopeful) that AMD will continue legacy driver updates for more than a year. New DX9 games are still extremely common, never mind games that work on DX10.

At the same time this cements the status of AMD’s DX10 GPUs under Windows 8. As those GPUs could never fully support WDDM 1.2, it has been clear for some time now that those GPUs would not be at parity with AMD’s DX11 GPUs under Windows 8. Officially AMD will not support Windows 8 with their legacy drivers, however Windows 8 will include a version of AMD’s legacy driver for their DX10 GPUs and any newer releases of AMD’s legacy drivers should be installable on Windows 8 with little-to-no fiddling. So with official support or not, nothing has really changed in this regard.

AMD’s full statement is below.

AMD will be moving the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series of products to a new driver support model.  We will continue to support the mentioned products in our Catalyst releases, but we’re moving their updates to a quarterly basis, whereas our AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products will continue to see monthly updates. The Quarterly Catalyst releases will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates. The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective. The 8.97 based driver, released in May 2012 will be the first driver for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series under the new support model; it is an extremely stable and robust driver branch for these products and will be the baseline for our quarterly updates.

Our main development and testing efforts will now be focused on the AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 and later products. This is the best use of our resources, as the AMD Radeon HD 5000, AMD Radeon HD 6000, AMD Radeon HD 7000, and future products have the greatest potential for further performance and feature enhancements.

Also with regards to Windows 8 support for the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, 3000, 4000 Series of products; the In-the-box AMD Graphics driver that ships with Windows 8 will include support for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 Series, and it will support the WDDM 1.1 driver level features. The AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products (AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later).

A couple of weeks ago one of my oldest friends in the industry, Godfrey Cheng, announced his resignation from AMD. Godfrey came over from the ATI side of the house to be a Director of Technical Marketing for AMD's client technologies. In the past I worked with Godfrey on everything from All in Wonder to UVD to CrossFire. Today I just got word that Godfrey joined Rick Bergman, another ex-AMDer, at Synaptics as a VP of Marketing.

I never quite understood the move to Synaptics, even when Bergman made it, until Godfrey's call to me today. He brought up an interesting point. A couple of years ago I wrote about an internal AMD project to build a first-generation Holodeck by 2016. The project was spearheaded by another ex-AMDer, Carrell Killebrew. At the time I was focused mostly on the compute aspects of making it happen, but Godfrey and Bergman's move to Synaptics finally clicked with me today.

I was in an unrelated meeting earlier today where I was discussing an extremely compute intensive problem with an engineer. Much to my surprise, the engineer told me that the problem we were discussing didn't require more compute than we had available today - it just needed an unbelievable amount of memory. In other words, the innovation necessary to solve this particular problem was secondary to compute.

That brings me to the Holodeck and a recent trend in the sort of innovation we've seen in the computing industry. The hard computing problems will continue to be solved by the AMDs, Intels and NVIDIAs of the world, but they've done such a good job over the past decade that the auxiliary players will now need to start playing a bigger role. We've seen this with the rise in importance of display technologies, but I suspect that companies like Synaptics that build touch and human interface controllers will also have the opportunity to move into the spotlight. Whether or not they do is another question, but the need for better interface technologies will only increase in the coming years.

I'm sure Synaptics pays well enough to attract good folks from companies like AMD and elsewhere, but I have to believe that a a not insignificant part of Godfrey and Bergman's decisions were motivated by the potential for a company focused on the human interface side of the problem. 

Good luck and we'll be here to cover the progress.

For those of you in the market for a new video card, some price relief is on its way. Earlier today AMD sent out an announcement that they’ll be dropping the price on half of the Radeon HD 7000 series lineup, bringing prices down at both the top and bottom ends of their product stack.

With the launch of the GeForce GTX 680 AMD lost their performance lead in the high-end market – and thereby losing their ability to charge top dollar – so this adjustment has been expected. However it’s a pleasant surprise to see it this soon since the GTX 680 is still significantly supply constrained. We weren’t expecting to see this price cut until the GTX 680 supply improved, as AMD is still the only option when it comes to readily available cards.

Altogether AMD will be reducing the prices on 3 of their 7000 series cards: the 7970, the 7950, and the 7770. The 7970 will be dropping by $70 from $549 to $479 – below the GTX 680 – while its lower tier counterpart the 7950 will be dropping $50 from $449 to $399. Meanwhile the 7770, which was undoubtedly the worst priced member of the 7000 series, will be seeing a price drop of $20 to bring it from $159 to $139.

For the 7900 series the price cuts will be part of a two pronged approach by AMD to drive 7900 series sales. The other change is that AMD will be significantly increasing the amount of software that comes with these cards in what AMD is calling their Three For Free promotion. Currently most major retailers include a free copy of DiRT 3 with their 7900 cards; AMD will be replacing that promo with Three For Free, which will be a trio of games: DiRT Showdown, Nexuiz, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution plus The Missing Link DLC.

Deus Ex was one of AMD’s major partner games from last year, while DiRT Showdown and Nexuiz are games that will not be released until next month. The inclusion of unreleased games is a bit odd, but considering that we’re just getting out of the post-Christmas game slump AMD’s options were either this or to include more 2011 games that many potential customers may already have. In any case, as with past AMD promotions these games will be given away via Steam keys.

Ultimately AMD has done enough to make the 7900 series once again competitive against the GTX 680, though how competitive is going to depend on how much you value AMD’s game bundle. A larger price cut would be a more straightforward value proposition, but AMD is better off adding value through the inclusion of games than further eroding their margins. Meanwhile the 7770’s new price is a welcome relief from its poor launch pricing, and while it’s still as expensive as the faster 6850 it’s no longer indefensibly overpriced for buyers looking to get a 28nm card. The only real odd man out here is the 7800 series; the 7850 is fine, however at $350 the 7870 is very close to the 7950, which could be bad news for one of those cards.

Wrapping things up, the price cut should be starting today while the Three For Free promo should be starting sometime in the next two weeks. We’re already seeing the prices come down on some Radeon cards with the rest soon to follow. But with the promo not starting for a couple more weeks, you may want to hold off on any 7900 purchases until it starts.

A few months ago during the Radeon HD 7970 launch we discussed how AMD would be revising their Independent Software Vendor (ISV) relations. While their efforts with ISVs in the past few years had been decent, AMD had not put a lot of money into it, and what money they did have was controlled by a relatively large bureaucracy. Consequently their efforts paled in comparison to NVIDIA’s, who put in far more money and effort into the process.

As a result one of AMD’s reforms for 2012 was going to be that they were going to put more money into ISV relations in order to catch up to NVIDIA. And while our discussion with the 7970 last year focused on the gaming side of things, AMD is also throwing more money behind ISV relations for their professional graphics business. After hitting a significant low against NVIDIA’s Quadro lineup, AMD’s market share for professional graphics has rebounded based on the strength of their 40nm DX11 GPUs, and AMD is looking to keep that momentum going with these improved ISV relations.

The first such major partnership of the year is with Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), a firm specializing in product lifecycle management software and CAD/CAM software. Earlier this month PTC launched their Creo 2.0 suite of applications, of which AMD has had a significant hand in helping PTC optimize. Specifically, AMD’s ISV group has been working on Creo Parametric 2.0, PTC’s CAD/CAM application.

With Creo Parametric 2.0, AMD and PTC have added support for a couple new features intended to significantly boost performance. The first is Order Independent Transparency, which you may recall from the launch of the Radeon HD 5870 back in 2009. Order independent transparency allows for quickly assembling a frame containing multiple transparent elements without sorting them first. In this case it allows Creo Parametric 2.0 to do accurate per-pixel transparency ordering at a much faster rate than in standard blending.

The other feature AMD helped PTC add was support for Vertex Buffer Objects, more commonly known as VBOs. As the name implies, VBOs are buffers of vertex data, the significance being that VBOs allow for vertex data to be stored as objects in VRAM rather than streamed to the video card during the rendering process. In situations with a great deal of polygons – and hence vertex data – VBOs can significantly speed up rendering, which is what PTC is doing in Creo Parametric 2.0 by using VBOs to speed up viewport performance. Like order independent transparency this isn’t a new idea – in fact it’s been around since OpenGL 2.1 – but this is a good example of how slowly CAD/CAM software adopts new technology compared to consumer applications.

As far as performance goes, AMD and PTC are looking at upwards of 9x the performance of PTC’s older software when it comes to transparency-bottlenecked situations, and a 5x improvement in viewport performance in situations similarly bound by vertex performance. Both of these changes are rather small elements of the complete rendering pipeline for Creo Parametric, however as far as AMD is concerned this is a great example for how offloading work to the GPU and making small optimizations can have a huge impact. And as a case study it's one they will no doubt be using to drive future ISV partnerships.

AMD has released the latest version of its Catalyst graphics driver package for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7. This version of the drivers introduces support for the Radeon HD 7800 series under Windows Vista and 7 - the 7700 and 7900 series cards were added in the last release, meaning that the Catalyst drivers now support the complete lineup of 7000-series cards. Windows XP support for these cards is slated to be introduced next month in Catalyst 12.4.

The new drivers also fix issues in a number of games, including a texture corruption bug in Skyrim that some of you mentioned was a problem with the 12.2 drivers. Other resolved issues include bugfixes in games like HAWX, Quake 4, XPlane, Alan Wake, and Far Cry 2, a crashing bug in the Furmark benchmark, and startup issues with the Catalyst Control Center.

The drivers support all Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000, and 7000 series graphics cards, IGPs, and APUs except where otherwise noted in the release notes, which are linked below. Support for the mobile versions of these cards is provided only to Windows Vista and 7 users.

Source: AMD

If the numbers are true, then most of you have already read our Kepler review, and you know that the card has made quite a splash - it's the highest-performing single-GPU card you can buy today, and it's got solid power consumption and a lower price than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 to boot. Kepler still needs to trickle down through the rest of NVIDIA's lineup, but for now NVIDIA has the high-end sewn up. Let's look at what its partners have put together.

As we've noted in past recaps, you should take these card measurements with a grain or two of salt. Manufacturers haven't standardized on a unit of measurement for their cards - some measure in inches and some in metric. I've done the necessary conversions and presented all measurements in both inches and millimeters, but manufacturers play a bit loose with these measurements and the actual physical dimensions may not exactly match the dimensions given on the spec sheet.

Common to all of these cards is 2GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus and all of Kepler's features - in fact, most of these cards have pretty much everything in common with one another, from the across-the-board stock clocks to the display outputs to the single-fan, dual-slot coolers to the lackluster bundles of accessories. This isn't uncommon with high-end launches of all-new architectures - we saw the same thing happen in our Radeon HD 7970 launch recap, another crop of cards that stuck to the reference design.

As such, there's not a ton to say about them, so I'll just make notes below when there's something about the card that makes it different from the stock card that we reviewed a couple of days ago.

ASUS (Product page)

EVGA (Product page)

Galaxy (Product page)

Gigabyte (Product page)

MSI (Product page)

MSI's graphics cards usually have a 3-year parts and 2-year labor warranty, and this card is no exception.

PNY (Product page)

This card is the only one in the lineup that costs more than $500, and there are a couple of reasons why: one is the lifetime warranty you can get by registering the card, and the other is the bundled HDMI cable. It's the only card in the lineup with anything more than power cables and DVI to VGA adapters. It's also the only card for which I can't find measurements (Amazon lists the length at eight inches, which I find suspect since the rest of the cards are at least ten). The card's dimensions should be similar to the others.

Zotac (Product page)

Zotac's is the only card in this lineup with a 2-year warranty instead of the 3-year warranty shared by most of the rest of them.

It has been weeks since we reviewed AMD's Radeon HD 7870 and 7850 cards, but unlike the 7900 and 7700 series cards, the 7800 series was given the typical middle-child treatment and paper launched. and cards began appearing at retailers just this week.

While Kepler's launch has cast a long shadow over the top end of the graphics market (a GTX 680 recap is coming later today, dont worry), but competition is still fierce, and as we noted in our review the 7850 is a solid performer and the fastest 150 watt card on the market today. Let's look at what AMD's partners have for us.

As we've noted in past recaps, you should take these card measurements with a grain or two of salt. Manufacturers haven't standardized on a unit of measurement for their cards - some measure in inches and some in metric. I've done the necessary conversions and presented all measurements in both inches and millimeters, but manufacturers play a bit loose with these measurements and the actual physical dimensions may not exactly match the dimensions given on the spec sheet.

Common to all of these cards is 2GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus, Eyefinity support, and all of GCN's features. All cards also offer identical outputs: two mini DisplayPorts, one HDMI port, and one DVI-I port. Normally we see a range of prices from different manufacturers due to factory overclocks, longer warranties, or included accessories, but in this case we've got identical prices across the board, making it much easier to make an apples-to-apples comparison among cards. As long as you don't have any particular brand loyalty, just pick the one with the value-added extras that you need the most.

ASUS (Product page)

The ASUS 7850 features a 10MHz overclock on both the GPU and the RAM, but it's so small that it won't increase framerates much at all over stock clocks. Its bundle of accessories is pretty sparse, but its 3-year warranty is tied with the Gigabyte card for the longest of the bunch.

This ASUS card's defining characteristic is the DirectCUII cooler, a huge two-fan cooler that was actually designed for longer cards like the Radeon HD 7950. On the shorter 7850, it hangs over the end of the card by quite a bit, requiring the use of an extension cord to make the 6-pin power connection accessible. This move may make the GPU cooler (and, by extension, get you a better overclock), but it will also require a larger case.

Gigabyte (Product page)

The Gigabyte card has a bit in common with the ASUS card - a big fancy two-fan cooler, a 3-year warranty, a bare accessory bundle - but it's a bit shorter in length, and it features an impressive 115MHz (about 12%) overclock on the core, which should actually net you a measurable increase in game performance. The memory clock , however, is left at stock.

HIS (Product page)

Here's a first in AnandTech Graphics Card Launch Recap History: the dimensions for this HIS card aren't available through Newegg or HIS's product page, or anywhere else that I can find (the product page gives "box dimensions", which is useful if you're shipping the card but not if you're using it). Luckily, its humdrum single-fan cooler means that the card should be unremarkable in this regard - I'd guess it should be close to eight inches long.

Otherwise, HIS doesn't give you much in terms of value-adds - it uses stock clocks, the two-year warranty is the minimum I like to see on components that cost this much, and the DVI to VGA adapter and Crossfire bridge constitute a pretty small accessory bundle. 

MSI (Product page)

With the MSI card, we're back to custom two-fan coolers and big heatsinks. A 40MHz (~4.5%) core overclock is respectable but small, and it uses stock memory clocks. A 3-year parts and 2-year labor warranty splits the difference between the longest and shortest warranties on the list.

Where MSI beats the competition is in its accessory bundle, which is actually worthy of the name - in addition to basics like power cable adapters (the Newegg product image appears to include two of these, though it only has the one six pin power plug on the back) and a DVI to VGA adapter, it also includes a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter.

PowerColor (Product page)

The PowerColor card is a lot like the HIS model in its single-fan cooler, 2-year warranty, and stock clocks, but it adds some useful display adapters to the package. PowerColor's card is the only one here that's using AMD's reference cooler for the 7850 series (visible on this page of our review).  

Sapphire (Product page)

Sapphire's take on the 7850, which uses another big two-fan cooler, is the only one in the list with a memory overclock worthy of the name. The 50MHz (4%) RAM overclock along with the 60MHz (6.5%) core overclock should give you a noticeable increase in framerates if you're not comfortable doing your own overclocking. Other benefits include the respectable accessory bundle and other drawbacks include a shorter 2-year warranty.

The road to any new microprocessor design is by no means simple. Planning for a major GPU like NVIDIA's Kepler starts four years prior to the chip's debut. In a world that's increasingly more focused on fast production and consumption of everything, it's insane to think of any project taking such a long period of time.

Chip planning involves figuring out what you want to do, what features you want, what the architecture should look like at a high level, etc...  After several rounds of back and forth in the planning stage, actual architecture work begins. This phase can take a good 1 - 1.5 years depending on the complexity of the design. Add another year for layout and validation work, then a 6 - 9 month race from tape out to products on shelves. The teams that spend years on these designs are made up of hard working, very smart people. They all tend to believe in what they're doing and they all show up trying to do the best job possible. 

Unfortunately, picking a target that's 4 years out and trying to hit it better than your competition is extremely difficult. You can put in an amazing amount of work, push through late nights, struggle with issues, be proud of what you've done and still fall short. We've seen this happen to companies on both sides of the fence, whether we're talking CPUs or GPUs, you win some and you lose some. 

Today NVIDIA unveiled Kepler, a more efficient 28nm derivative of its Fermi architecture. The GeForce GTX 680 is the first productized Kepler for the desktop and if you read our review, it did very well. As our own Ryan Smith wrote in his conclusion to the GeForce GTX 680 review:

"But in the meantime, in the here and now, this is by far the easiest recommendation we’ve been able to make for an NVIDIA flagship video card. NVIDIA’s drive for efficiency has paid off handsomely, and as a result they have once again captured the performance crown."

We've all heard stories about what happens inside a company when a chip doesn't do well. Today we have an example of what happens after years of work really pay off. A trusted source within NVIDIA forwarded us a copy of Jen-Hsun's (NVIDIA's CEO) email to all employees, congratulating them on Kepler's launch. With NVIDIA in (presumably) good spirits today, I'm sure they won't mind if we share it here.

If you ever wondered what it's like to be on the receiving end of a happy Jen-Hsun email, here's your chance:

“How do you follow up on Fermi?” That’s the question we had going into NVIDIA’s press briefing for the GeForce GTX 680 and the Kepler architecture earlier this month. With Fermi NVIDIA not only captured the performance crown for gaming, but they managed to further build on their success in the professional markets with Tesla and Quadro. Though it was a very clearly a rough start for NVIDIA, Fermi ended up doing quite well in the end.

So how do you follow up on Fermi? As it turns out, you follow it up with something that is in many ways more of the same. With a focus on efficiency, NVIDIA has stripped Fermi down to the core and then built it back up again; reducing power consumption and die size alike, all while maintaining most of the aspects we’ve come to know with Fermi. The end result of which is NVIDIA’s next generation GPU architecture: Kepler.

Launching today is the GeForce GTX 680, at the heart of which is NVIDIA’s new GK104 GPU, based on their equally new Kepler architecture. As we’ll see, not only has NVIDIA retaken the performance crown with the GeForce GTX 680, but they have done so in a manner truly befitting of their drive for efficiency.

Two weeks ago AMD officially unveiled the Radeon HD 7800 series. Composed of the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7850, AMD broke from their earlier protocol with the 7700 and 7900 series and unveiled the cards ahead of their actual launch in order to beat CeBIT and GDC. The result was a pair of impressive – if expensive – cards that cemented AMD’s control of the high-end video card market. Unfortunately because of this early unveiling you couldn’t buy one at the time.

Those two weeks have now come and gone, and the 7800 series has finally been released for sale. Because AMD’s partners have largely passed on AMD’s reference design for the 7870 series we wanted to take a look at what the actual retail cards would be like; with almost everyone using a custom cooler and many partners using factory overclocks, there’s a great deal of variation between cards. To that end HIS and PowerColor have sent over their top 7870 cards, the HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo and the PowerColor PCS+ HD7870. How do these retail cards stack up compared to our reference 7870, and what kind of impact do their factory overclocks bring? Let’s find out.