THE NEW AGE OF GAMES

Ugh!

I really am not up to typing this out as I am ill. I took receipt of two very nice Vape juices and within a couple of hours I was going down with my first does of the flu for a few years! Typical.

I have been wading through the Internet and YouTube as there are now announcements regarding AMD's Polaris, even brief one of Zen, and nVidia's Pascal coming thick and fast!

Only ... it has been a little odd, I am not the only one to have noticed and I am now wondering whether or not people are actually going to wake up to being fooled as well as being misled?

Basically nVidia announced there cards and everyone went nuts. Except I thought the cards sounded complete shite, many people missed an important point but some did spot it.

In fact I sometimes wonder to people's sanity and their own self proclaimed levels of intelligence as I have seen many arguments with the typical nVidia fanboys stating "The 1080 is 2.5 times the power of the 980!" Or they stated the 980Ti, cannot remember, does not matter ... because no it does not!

I wanted to chuckle each time someone then replied with "Nooo! It is 2.5x the performance in Virtual Reality, did you even WATCH the video?!" LMAO!

But then once corrected they are harping on about the actual 30% increase in power, so wwe have moved 150% to 30% or 2.5 times to 0.33 times the power.

Umm ... did anyone note the insane clocks?

A node shrink and insane clocks? I am sorry but I expected a fair bit more than that to be honest and I thought it would be in excess of 50% at the very least.

Oh yeah, and the node shrink? Absolutely everyone completely forgot about one other thing regarding node shrinks that it seemed nVidia forgot all about too?!

It wont be to scale but as an example 14nm is half the size of 28nm. They pay for the wafers used to grow chips so for the same money they get, theoretically but like I said not quite to scale, double thee amount.

This equates to being half the price of the previous equivalent chips. NOT far more expensive!

Yet there will be these morons that think themselves sooo smart that will fight tooth and nail to defend nVidia while being taken advantage of while their back is turned that they might as well bend over and drop their pants!

These same people were also bitching about AMD's Polaris chip and how it needs to be less than $300?! A chip no one has tested. Jesus Christ, do these people even HEAR themselves?! Do they even read back the utter tripe they type?!

So when I then saw a headline in a report that stated that AMD have just announced $200 for their Polaris 10 card I was ... taken aback and laughing like a drain! Hmm, why do we say that? Drains do not laugh, lol.

So all these morons would finally shut the hell up as the Polaris is not only cheaper than the £300 they harped on about but was a whole $100 cheaper than that? Umm ... welllllll .... noooo...

You see now what they are saying is that the card must be absolute shit to be priced that cheap ... despite the fact that AMD have clearly iterated and re-iterated many times that they were going to release the cards cheap, get VR to the masses and that everyone would be shocked.

Nope! The small minded fanboys who have no life popping off to anyone to get a rise out of them with all their spelling mistakes ad typos still troll around the Internet looking for someone or something they want to disagree with.

I will give you a little info ... I have lost count at the number of times I have wanted to reply and rip the living daylights out of these people and I ... resist. I think, no, no don't. They think they are smart but they are not and will not listen because they actually believe that their deductions are so good that they are both immediate and infallible. You cannot help nor educate people like that just let them go off and blow that same old trumpet.

All they succeed in doing is leaving one hell of a trail on the Internet that can be traced back for bloody eons proving over and over again that they are small minded fools.

But ... Polaris being $200? Wow, not even I expected that!

I am very interested to see how it benchmarks, with what drivers and if they are stable or not, as this might give us an insight into the faster cards from AMD coming between October and early 2017.

I like the idea of them moving the 'X' moniker to after the 'R' and doing away with the '9' and '7' as it was stupid and confused less tech savvy people. Oddly everyone is still expecting a Radeon RX-480X. Maybe a X Series Radeon RXX-480XXX? LMFAO.

I am expecting an RX-490 and two Fury cards and all based on Vega. You were told about Polaris 10 and 11 and have now been shown them and told when. Next is Vega.

I cannot remember now, was there a 470 mentioned?

I had noted that the compute units had dropped in number from the R9-390 which was interesting. I realised that there is a large area for increases in these CU's to 9 increase in number. A very large area and you just know that the top Vega will have more of them than thee Fiji chips? I feel pretty confident about this.

Hmm ... unless that ends up being the Navi chip?

At the end of the day they will both have to space out the increases in power, compute units and chip sizes until it is time to move on from both 14 and 16 nanometres and likely onto 10 nanometres?

Do this too quickly by competing too much and you end up with things being squeezed in without the proper engineering and you know what happens then, right? Things get too hot ... oooh wait a minute?!

Another things that everyone noticed very quickly was that when nVidia made their announcement o their 1070 and 1080 cards the Internet and YouTube was awash with them.

You could not move for all the videos and all the convenient memories of tech journalist fanboys, or on the payroll, for crap about how brilliant the 1070 and 1080 was. I was furious at the over use of the "2.5x" which was a load of shit and quite deliberately misleading.

AMD have an announcement and you would be doing damn well if you heard any of those same journalists so much as break wind!

Luckily and quite fortunately I was far from being the only one that noticed this.

Sorry but I think that being paid off is not only completely immoral it is the very basis for how corruption starts and is so rife. It is both expected and hated in equal measure and many times seemingly by equal amounts?

Now all I have to do is chew on my fingernails until October.

What's all that blood? Lol.

SHINING POLARIS & PASCAL IMMINENT

Yeeeaah...funny times and goings on at the moment.

I have been perusing through webpages and expecting some benchmarking to come up of the imminent GPUs from both AMD and nVidia but not much has come out.

Ohh much has been said, that is sure enough, but nothing has come out.

The first thing I noticed was nVidia's surprise and knee-jerk reaction to all the talk about AMD's Polaris and some big claims were made. Only they weren't.

'Its got double the speed of that and this amount of power compared to this' was stated a lot. Except it was not quite how it was put across.

There is no doubt that it is way too early to call anything yet but what nVidia stated themselves was that the only way you were going to see these massive boosts in performance and that was if you already had or planning to purchase imminently a Virtual Reality headset. Oh and that those threee short sentences about the nVidia 1070? What was up with that? Weird.

Many got so giddy headed that they failed to note that the up and coming nVidia 1080 GPU was around 30% up on the nVidia 980Ti. Yeah that is good ... ish. It certainly is not double!

In the red corner you have the fans by the ring side giving up theories of the advancement in power of the imminent AMD Polaris 10 GPU. Also predicting whether or not these cards will be Radeon 480's with the 'X' prefix or not and that the 480 will be as fast as the Radeon 390.

Some are saying more.

I will go on record to state I am going to side with the 'more' camp and that a fraction over a Fury card might be the case.

This is a big lithography jump and if you say that Pascal is a shrunk Maxwell card and has 30% then you can say that the new node brings 30% improvements. Except, no in AMD's case.

Because they have changed and added several things to the GCN GPUs.

They themselves have stated it is the biggest jump n their history. They are not stupid enough to repeat what happened with bulldozer which was more than many tech journalists made out anyway. Ergo, you can game on an AMD A10-7850K APU. Simply stating that you cannot game on said chip is quite simply untrue.

The same is true of the FX chips but yes they did not turn out quite as I had envisioned. I thought the very idea was sound but went wrong in the process somewhere. I also put it down to desperation because, and as I stated, the new node shrinks were taking longer than they had previously.

This even put Moore's Law on the brink of collapse, though he only stated it would last ten years and was a great prediction.

We are now on the brink of an amazing 6 months of tech gold and then some!

Two GPUs with Pascal and Polaris and then there is Zen. Throw in the node shrink and it is all good, though I am very interested indeed in the latter two from AMD. Am interested in Pascal, do not get me wrong but would be more so had they announced loads of core level changes as AMD have done.

Then there will be the HBM 2 chips and everyone keeps stating that it wont be ready until September? Err yeeeah that is HBM 2. What about HBM 1? This is just a die shrink after all which is not what HBM 2 is. Not in my opinion but I could be wrong here. These are on top of the GPUs when they are grown, so surely the same HBM is the same lithography and I see HBM 2 as having other things improved. Like the interconnects? Maybe higher stacks?

The way I see it is that the one I am more interested in waiting for, which is AMD's Vega though I am also interested in say a 1080Ti or a Titan Z and what they can do, Vega is the one I am likely to be if my theories are correct and I have read everything right?

Oh and Vega in October?! *CHOMP-CHOMP-CHOMP* Feck it! No fingernails!

Deus Ex Mankind Divided in August, Radiohead album out imminently and I even had an extra album not long ago from my very much loved Pink Floyd. Another Amused to Death style album from Roger Waters and I think I just might die this year?!

LMAO!

Oh...my...god and then there are the movies!

Oh and the Blu-Ray releases like Batman v Superman and all the info about Justice League that will come out? Doctor Strange.

Possibly a surprise Mass Effect release and I am even seeing rumours about Elder Scrolls VI Argonia and a possible release or announcement?! WHAT?!?!

Oh-oh-oh and then there are the Playstation Neo and XBTwo announcements?! Awww I can't call it X-Bone any more? Oh darn it!

So much is going to be occurring I am not sure if I will be able to keep up?!

Where did I PUT those damned blood pressure pills?!

WITCHER 3 - IMPOSSIBLE INSECTOID ... CRAB ... BOSS ... THINGEY!

LMAO!

So ... I went back to The Witcher 3 ... forgotten all the controls it had been so long and forgot about this!

Then I remembered why I had stopped playing it last time!

I clearly am not levelled up enough to beat this large Insectoid or crab like creature ... but ... I am bloody stubborn and would have given it fifty attempts and then exited the game with no interest go go back and try again. Well on the last fifty attempts that is, lol.

I think now I remember I quite the game to keep the upload small to show I am back in this game and will have to go to an earlier save before we go off to kill this thing.

The problem is I am thinking this was a mission I started and at the same time pointing out another problem, along with the tiny effects I have had on this creature, did get its life energy down to 50% at my best attempt, that ... wizard, or whatever he is, stands their attacking it for ages and has no effect on the creature whatsoever.

That's a bit pants to be honest, lol. Might as well not even be there!

Still, I will go to an earlier save, which I really hate having to do, and try and get back into this and remember where I am, what missions I had to do, where in the story I was and recall the controls, lol.

Well it has been longer than 6 months since I played it last, I did not even expect to be at home, or in the same home, about now.

And remember ... I have memory problems ... and do not take that as me being STUPID as that is not what it means.

As you can see from my other videos or my fourteen blogs ... I have a degree in applied computing and am expert in herpetology, batrachology, ichthyology, orhidaceae, astronomy, astrophysics and I even know Wing Chun.

Lol, too many people, trolls and fanboys are far too quick to make immediate assumptions about people on the Internet and I would rather just try and avoid all that up front. LMAO!

I completed Deus Ex Human Revolution again, hoping it would last me up until Mankind Divided in August, or close. But I whizzed through it far quicker than I expected too and wish I had upped the difficulty on it?!

I think I uploaded some Deus Ex stuff?

Darn it!!

I notice now my earlier prediction of the Nintendo NX is having unconfirmed leaks appearing that it is to use AMD's Polaris. Hearing this about the PS4.5 thing and the XBOne.5 too.

Well if I recall they did state when they designed the PS4 and XBOne that they did so with the idea of upgrading being easier. I did think of them improving it but thought it more likely they were talking about backwards compatibility with the PS5 and XBTwo with the previous generations for the older games.

But I also did state that in my opinion they sounded well under powered too.

All this has to do with the fact that the previous generations had been out a very long time and the chip lithography shrinkage, node shrink/chip shrink, from 28 nanometres to 16 and 14 nanometres was way, way later than previous in arriving. Unless you went solely to Intel for CPUs, way over priced, and GPUs, way underpowered, for your chips.

Yeah right, lol, no one in their right minds would do that, especially wanting to sell the machines/consoles for well under £500. You can pay double that just for a decent, not half decent but decent, Intel CPU. For me that is an 8 core, Core i7. A four core and eight thread CPU would be a half decent one in my book. But the prices! OK to begin with bit pricey but they have stayed high ...

..or at least will until AMD's Zen 6, 8 and 16 core CPUs arrive and then it will go mad for about 6 months to two years!

Surprised that the AM4 motherboards have not appeared on retail listings as they were meant to arrive in March and it is now mid April.

I could regurgitate everything that is said or leaked on here but I am not going to do that. I absolutely hate it when people and websites do that and I am always seeing the same crap over and over. If I hate it then I simply will not do this myself.

The latest seems to suggest that the Polaris chips will arrive around June or July time and Zen around October to November time?

I fully expect that these chips will be faster than the 390's by some margin. I also expect that Vega with HBM2 will arrive around December to February at the latest and will be so fast that we will have to pick up our chins?!

I fully expect a big improvement from nVidia but reading between the lines it seems likely that they will be a step behind AMD this time around? Likely not far behind but behind is what I expect them to be.

As totally natural for nVidia's Pascal to be fairly swifter than their old cards, plus rumour of them ceasing Maxwell production, along with AMD's confidence and string of design wins, companies all lining up to use Polaris and Vega, is why I am expecting old 390's to be eating the dust of Polaris 10 and 11.

I still want to wait for Vega though to pair with a 16 or 8 core Zen, whichever the larger core count turns out to be.

Though I wont be using an APU this time around I am also very interested to see an APU using Zen along with what graphics they use on the chip, how it pairs up with a graphics card on Crossfire along with all the heterogenous compute stuff, which is improved over previous APU's and I would like to see this fully exploited to see what it can do?

Imagine an AMD APU with 8 Zen cores and also able to use the cores from the integrated GPU for normal computing tasks?! I wonder if we will ever see 16 Zen cores and an integrated GPU?!

Ooh would you look at that? I have dribbled all over my keyb ... *

THE COMING OF THE NEXT GENERATION

Well it's been quiet on the news front.

Well that is if you don't count the announcement that AMD AM4 motherboards were going on sale in March, umm last month, which every single computer tech site religiously copied.

Then there was the site claiming to have benchmarks for an engineering sample of AMD's next generation, in everything way, CPU called Zen. I then couldn't help but check the date and she enough it was the 1st April!

The aforementioned websites of course then copied said website and everyone was reporting it.

Supposed to be tech journalists? What tossers.

What's hilarious is that they all copy each other and then can't help themselves blowing their I own bugles when the copied report turns out to be correct. Don't mention when they got it wrong though, funny that.

What makes the April fools joke a pain is that for at least a week the pages reporting this keep coming up in the first few pages of search results. Morons keep commenting on it so many keep coming up for weeks! Great!

Annoyingly they also don't take the effing pages down either, click baiting much?

But it's getting ever closer to many early presents appearing what with Deus Ex Mankind Divided with AMD's GPU Polaris arriving just prior or about the same time. Then shortly after AMD's Zen should appear finally and by that time the new m.2 and NVMe drives should be hitting a good place and price?

Hopefully by this time some more games should have been announced, maybe even some being coded with the next generation graphics cards in mind?

Oh course there is nVidia's Pascal GPU and HBM should be getting somewhere by then. Perhaps AMD's Vega GPU won't be too far behind all of these things?

They seem to be starting off late that it will be Vega that will have HBM 2.0 and be the replacement to AMD's Fiji graphics cards?

I'm hoping for some serious competition between AMD and nVidia on the graphics card front and AMD and Intel on the CPU front?

That would be cool! Very, very cool!

Also mouth watering from Intel, for once in a blue moon, was that new Xeon CPU with 22 cores and 44 threads, I think it was. I think the price was in the region of $4,000 though?!

Cor blimey! Nice though!

Now if I can just pick out the six winning numbers on the lottery one week!

I can remember drooling over single core chips and Intel having dual CPU socket motherboards! Now you can get 22 cores on a single chip!

Now with the die and node shrink shook we need for done very good time I'd for AMD to push the envelope beyond 8 cores on the consumer front and ... well, oh boy what good times will roll.

Probably won't happen immediately but it won't take much or very long for a rush between the two of them to outdo reach other on the consumers front.

Wasn't interested in any Intel chips, I don't believe what they report as it's shite, but that Xeon ... ooooh boy, lol.

Now just counting down the months until some engineering sample benchmarks start appearing.

Funny as we have not had much in the easy of excitement but now we are looking at 4 or 5 chips, at least, over the next 6 to 8 months. Polaris, Vega, Zen, Pascal and whatever Intel will introduce as a knee jerk to Zen? They, Intel, have to do it, you just know they will.

Let the good times roll!

THE APPROACHING NEW ERA

Well it has been awhile since I typed anything out about the up and coming CPUs and GPUs.

But then I really do not like to use every excuse to publish something, like many like to do, and then harp on for the first couple of paragraphs explaining how I had previously stated this with a series of dates that go back a year or two, YAWN!

I always check though and have a read around once or twice a week, though sometimes I leave it a couple of weeks so that news and rumours can build up.

So at the moment it is looking like AMD's Polaris is going to be with us in a couple of months time and thankfully their Zen processor in October, see? I ... SNIP!

This is great news and better still seems to be the buzz about them. The lower power draws for Polaris 10, as they are naming it, sound absolutely great as does that being predicted for Zen.

The latest seems to be projecting an 8 core Zen releasing in October of this year, 2016, but I am still expecting something with a larger core count than 8 and purely because of the 14nm Finfet lithography they are using. This is not merely just a shrink but, as I understand it to be, a stacking too.

So if you can make an 8 core processor on 28nm you can make a 16 on 14nm, theoretically though the size may have to alter slightly.

Now start to stack them?

I would imagine that in the first versions the stacking may only be usable if done once, but later on with some refinement may stack three layers high, with luck. So HBM memory could go on the third layer, which I would wager is what the Zen+ turns out to be? We will see.

The only thing I worry about is that the consoles will hold back many game developers from utilising this extra power ... unless ... the Nintendo NX, fingers crossed, uses these new Polaris GPUs or that the XBOne can be upgraded, via a plug in graphics card. Microsoft have alluded to as much and lets be honest, Sony had that Vaio Carbon laptop several years ago that had that separate GPU in a box ... umm, thingey! Lol.

As they are meant to be so similar it stands to reason that the Playstation 4 can probably be upgraded graphics chip wise too? Umm, it is Sony!

Of course I am simply going to have to build one!

My only worry is that I build an 8 core Zen PC build only to have them release a 12 or 16 core Zen chip two or three months later?! Grr! Maybe when Zen is finally released we would have found out whether or not a higher core count Zen will release in early 2017?

I also note that in the wake of Polaris things were at first quiet on the nVidia front but then a flurry of information started to surface.

It is times like this that puts credence in both the new info, nVidia, to that previously released, AMD, as one is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the other releasing details. At least that's one of the techniques I have used to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I do so hate chaff.

It will be such an interesting time to see what Zen, Polaris and Pascal can do and of course added to this will be Intel's own knee-jerk reaction to AMD's releases. So if you think that the second half of 2016 is going to be both mad and exciting, well just wait until the first half of 2017!

For me the Intel chips have done bugger all in the way of progression and added to that they have remained artificially high, some VERY high, with the higher core count chips of 6 and 8 cores. This is so bloody typical of Intel of old and it seemed like forever back in the day to go from a 386 to a 486 CPU, the two chips that preceded the Pentium, which was in essence the 586.

Though I use an AMD A10-7850K right now I will be building with a solely Zen CPU core next time around. The highest core count they release or at least intend to release between October 2016 and probably March 2017, if my nerves can hold out that long.

Saying that I am still interested in what APUs they will be releasing using the Zen cores along with what they will do with the GPU side of the APU. I mean to think of something as could be as powerful as a R9-380 or a Maxwell in an APU? Maybe if it turned out to be better still these could have a dramatic effect on the Virtual Reality headsets also releasing over similar time frames to all these other chips.

I like the idea now, finally, of having a really small form factor PC that can do everything I ask of it and store everything I ask of it and do tasks in a fraction of the time they do now? Oooh.

Also about that time 4K might be becoming commonplace and in so doing mobile telecoms companies and other IP providers will have to up their speeds and stop screwing the public for simply looking at a few webpages and downloading a few small files.

Tech simply has to keep up with tech. But they are such lamentable human beings and completely greedy that I think it will take an uproar from customers and government then forcing them before they do this.

A 4GB download limit was utterly laughable when I first saw them set the figure several years ago, now beyond ridiculous and soon to be 'way out there' ridiculous.