Skip to main content

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.

Recommended Videos

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

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

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.”

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Apple’s secret Vision Pro controller suggests it’s finally taking VR gaming seriously
A person gaming on the Apple Vision Pro headset.

You would think that Apple’s Vision Pro headset would be the perfect platform for virtual reality (VR) gaming. After all, it has a top-notch processor, super-high-resolution displays, and both VR and augmented reality (AR) capabilities. In theory, that should make it a leading device for gamers.

The reality is, unfortunately, very different, with few popular gaming titles making it onto visionOS. And really, Apple’s headset is held back by one key weakness: its lack of proper VR controller support.

Read more
Big tech is dominating my digital life — here’s how I fixed it
big tech logos around capitol hill

Big tech companies are so dominant and so far-reaching right now that people could probably live their entire digital lives interacting only with Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon products. Things never got quite that bad for me but I did realize recently that I've been relying far too much on Google, plus I’ve been using Safari for years even though I don’t actually like it that much.

So I decided to find some new apps to try out and came across a nice resource full of European, open-source, or non-profit alternatives for a range of different services. It introduced me to quite a few apps that are more than good enough to replace what I was using, and although I’m not hardcore enough to completely kick Google out of my life, I’m pretty happy with the results.
What’s so bad about big tech?

Read more
Meta faces lawsuit for training AI with pirated books
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

In a recent lawsuit, Meta has been accused of using pirated books to train its AI models, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's approval. As per Ars Technica, the lawsuit filed by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman in a California federal court, cite internal Meta communications indicating that the company utilized the Library Genesis (LibGen) dataset—a vast online repository known for hosting pirated books—despite internal concerns about the legality of using such material.

The authors argue that Meta's actions infringe upon their copyrights and could undermine the company's position with regulators. They claim that Meta's AI models, including Llama, were trained using their works without permission, potentially harming their livelihoods. Meta has defended its practices by invoking the "fair use" doctrine, asserting that using publicly available materials to train AI tools is legal in certain cases, such as "using text to statistically model language and generate original expression."

Read more