AMD talks DirectFlip, Fury X2 And More In AMA

AMD says in Reddit AMA that Polaris production is unaffected by earthquake

amd markham campus — Image used with permission by copyright holder

AMD’s recent AMA on discussion site Reddit, was a little muted compared to some of the candid chats had with certain celebrities and other companies. As a publicly traded company, AMD is restricted by the whims of stock holders and news releases, the representatives reminded us, but it did reveal some details which are worth picking out.

For starters, AMD confirmed that the differences in behavior seen between AMD and Nvidia hardware on the Ashes of the Singularity demo recently, were down to a driver issue (thanks PCPer). That should be fixed when AMD adds DirectFlip – which can affect power consumption and memory allocation – support in the near future.

While it didn’t say exactly when, we were told that it will happen “shortly.”

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That’s much the same notification the AMD staffers gave us with regards to the Fury X2, the dual core Fiji XT card that was initially pegged for a close of 2015 release. If it arrives before the new generation Pascal/Polaris cards from Nvidia and AMD respectively, it is expected to the most powerful single PCB graphics card in the world.

Apparently that initial release was shifted to “better align with the market,” for commercial head mounted displays (HMD) for virtual reality. This was the expected reason back when the delay was first announced, so it looks like we may well see the Fury X2 coming in April now.

In terms of more forward thinking hardware, like the aforementioned Polaris GPUs and the Zen CPUs AMD is working on for later this year, representatives were again rather cagey. However they did admit that everything was on track for a release within the next few months. They also made it clear that the recent Taiwan earthquake had not affected production.

One of the responders, AMD_Robert, also explained that TrueAudio was not a feature AMD had abandoned, but that it was seeing the most love from console developers right now. He hopes however that this will change the advent of virtual reality, where 3D audio is much more important.

He also made an interesting aside about why we don’t see more advanced Thermal Interface Materials in processors, and the reason was that they actually get quite expensive.

Much of the rest of the discussion merely confirmed or clarified things we already knew. The Vulkan Linux driver from AMD will be released soon, but it will only run on the AMDGPU kernel driver. AMD went on to deny that it would launch a Linux compatible Vulkan driver built upon any other driver stack.

In terms of when that might be released, we’re told it’s more like “weeks,” and won’t be “months.”

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