PrMinisterGR:

Until you need to use Direct Storage.

That's a myth.

cucaulay malkin:

let me ask again,how would e.g. 10 rdna2 CUs have the same power as 10 vega CUs ? what are you talking about ? you are trying to defend amd so hard but fact is they've been stagnant since 1st gen apus (2200/2400) they're only trying to bring down production costs by using smaller vega gpus and clocking them higher

RDNA2 is bit more bandwidth efficient than last of GCN (Vega). By itself it would not be big improvement. If there was die size investment to IC, I am sure, graphical performance of APUs could even double. I would not be surprised if 8 RDNA2 CUs run circles around 10/11 GCN CUs. But problem is different. Transistor cost of 10 Vega CUs vs 8 RDNA2 CUs + IC. My guess is that IC investment would start to show worth when APUs use 16CUs+.

itpro:

PrMinisterGR:

Until you need to use Direct Storage.

That's a myth.

Current: Storage (compressed) => RAM (compressed) => CPU (decompression) => RAM (Inflated) => PCIe transfer of inflated data towards GPU/VRAM Direct Storage: Storage (compressed) => PCIe transfer of compressed data towards GPU/VRAM => VRAM (compressed) => GPU (decompression) => VRAM (inflated) Guess what? Direct Storage saves a lot of PCIe bandwidth when it gets to provisioning of new data.

heffeque:

Also AV1 decode is an important addition on RDNA 2. Almost no CPU is capable of decoding AV1 through software in the highest settings. Personally my i7-8550U can't do AV1 on 1080p 10bit on difficult scenes with high bitrate and movement. It makes me feel like I'm watching a 2CD DivX movie on my old Pentium II 266 MHz. You can test it yourselves with Netflix's test videos: OBU files (can be opened for example with MPC-HC 1.9.10) has files up to 4K: http://download.opencontent.netflix.com/?prefix=AV1/Chimera/ MP4 files (can be opened with any modern player, including VLC) has files up to 1080p: http://download.opencontent.netflix.com/?prefix=AV1/Chimera/Old/ Minute 2:30 and forward on 10 bit anything higher than 720p is unplayable on my 8550U.

So... seeing that nobody commented about this again, I'm guessing that nobody really cares about the AV1 support?

heffeque:

So... seeing that nobody commented about this again, I'm guessing that nobody really cares about the AV1 support?

It might still have it, the video decoder engine isn't really linked to the architecture, they can update it independently, as seen with ravenridge and renoir which both have vega igpus, yet feature VCN hardware like navi.

user1:

It might still have it, the video decoder engine isn't really linked to the architecture, they can update it independently, as seen with ravenridge and renoir which both have vega igpus, yet feature VCN hardware like navi.

Hope you are right!