12:05PM EDT - AMD is talking about the rise of e-sports gaming

12:06PM EDT - Display resolutions are rapidly increasing. 4K monitors have dropped from $3000 to $400-600

12:06PM EDT - Smooth frame rates have become another area of focus, in addition to simply having a high frame rate

12:07PM EDT - Virtual reality is also an area that AMD sees as rapidly expanding

12:07PM EDT - VR requires exceptionally high frame rates and low latency

12:08PM EDT - Okay, after some WiFi problems we';re here

12:08PM EDT - Now on stage: Devin Nekechuk to introduce the Radeon 300 series

12:09PM EDT - AMD is starting off by talking about the R7 and R9 300 series cards.

12:09PM EDT - First up, R7 360

12:11PM EDT - AMD is discussing VSR. Not exclusive to the 300 series though.

12:13PM EDT - First card is the R7 360, the base of the line.

12:13PM EDT - R7 370 is next. $149 and up to 4GB of VRAM. Not clear if those two go together, as they said "up to"

12:14PM EDT - Now moving onto cards for more intensive games, and for gaming at higher resolutions

12:15PM EDT - Next is the R9 380. AMD claims it can power 1440p. Starts at $199, up to 4GB VRAM.

12:15PM EDT - R9 390 and 390X start at $329 and $429. Both have 8GB of GDDR5. Meant for 4K gaming

12:17PM EDT - Now talking about DX12

12:17PM EDT - DX12 launching with Win10, July 29th is not far away

12:18PM EDT - AMD now inviting up some game developers and a Microsoft developer

12:19PM EDT - Developers seeing significant CPU usage reductions with DX12

12:21PM EDT - Now talking to the developer from Lionhead about DX12 in the Fable series

12:22PM EDT - Asynchronous shaders to execute shading concurrently with other rendering are an important feature

12:23PM EDT - Windows 10 beta of Fable Legends coming in the near future.

12:24PM EDT - Now on display: Stardock/Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity

12:24PM EDT - Now talking about RTS games

12:25PM EDT - Oxide is going to be one of the first companies to really use DX12. They're looking to push a lot of draw calls

12:25PM EDT - RTS games have traditionally had to swap to 2D sprites when characters are too far away. Not required with DX12.

12:26PM EDT - CPU power freed up by using DX12 can be put into making more complex AI

12:27PM EDT - Alpha this Thursday

12:27PM EDT - Now moving onto VR. AMD's Richard Huddy is back on stage

12:29PM EDT - Anuj Gosalia of Oculus is talking

12:30PM EDT - AMD is going to be banking hard on VR for this generation. From a business standpoint it requires lot of GPU power, and from a tech standpoint they have what should be a good solution

12:31PM EDT - Low latency is the big focus in VR

12:31PM EDT - Now discussing how Oculus is using AMD's LiqudVR tech, which was first announced back at GDC in March

12:32PM EDT - Oculus has been working with AMD to use their LiquidVR tech

12:32PM EDT - Direct hardware access for low latency, multi-GPU per-eye rendering, async shading/warping, etc

12:32PM EDT - Oculus has shipped 150K dev kits (wow)

12:33PM EDT - Oculus has shipped 150,000 dev kits so far

12:33PM EDT - And of course, the final consumer Rift ships in Q1 of next year

12:35PM EDT - For AMD GPUs, Oculus is recommending R9 290/390 and higher

12:35PM EDT - Recommended GPU spec for Oculus is the R9 290 or faster

12:35PM EDT - This is consistent with their earlier developer target recommendation of R9 290

12:36PM EDT - Now speaking, CCP on EVE: Valkyrie

12:36PM EDT - They've been one of the darling early VR demos, and will be shipping on PC and PS4 (Morpheus)

12:37PM EDT - Game will be released alongside the Rift, so Q1 2016 (it)

12:38PM EDT - Huddy now has the stage to himself again

12:38PM EDT - Discussing how VR is being used for non-gaming applications

12:38PM EDT - Now on stage, Katrina Craigwell from GE

12:39PM EDT - GE is using VR for brain imaging visualization

12:41PM EDT - And that's a wrap on GE

12:42PM EDT - Okay, time for the high-end GPU announcement

12:42PM EDT - (If you haven't already seen the leaks, well, then you'll probably be the only person surprised by this)

12:42PM EDT - Now on stage, Chris Hook of AMD. Director of marketing

12:43PM EDT - Leading into a discussion about small form factor PCs

12:44PM EDT - Presenting Project Quantum

12:44PM EDT - A custom SFF case

12:45PM EDT - Contains 2 of AMD's new Fiji GPUs

12:45PM EDT - Processors on the bottom, cooling on the top

12:45PM EDT - Now rolling a promo video

12:47PM EDT - Begun, the Closed Loop Liquid Cooler wars have

12:47PM EDT - The company has clearly taken what they've learned from R9 295X2

12:47PM EDT - Which, though $1500 was a successful product for a dual-GPU card and a solid design

12:48PM EDT - Now on stage, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su

12:48PM EDT - "Most complex and highest performance GPU we have ever built"

12:49PM EDT - There will be multiple products with Fiji

12:49PM EDT - AMD Radeon R9 Fury X

12:50PM EDT - 1.5x perf per watt of R9 290X

12:50PM EDT - R9 Fury (vanilla) will be air-cooled

12:50PM EDT - Cards will be in stores "very shortly"

12:51PM EDT - AMD Radeon R9 Nano

12:51PM EDT - Fiji in a a 6" card, half the power of 290X

12:51PM EDT - (Sounds like it's significantly cut down from full Fiji)

12:51PM EDT - Nano will be available later this summer

12:52PM EDT - Finally, a dual-GPU card that's in the Quantum, but hasn't been named or shown

12:52PM EDT - Now on stage, Joe Marci, Raja Koduri, and Chris Hook again

12:53PM EDT - Raja is now explaining the human element behind designing Fiji

12:55PM EDT - Focus on 4K and HBM

12:55PM EDT - Specs

12:55PM EDT - 4069 stream processors, 8.9B transistors

12:55PM EDT - 4096 SPs, even

12:55PM EDT - 8.6 TFLOPs, 1050MHz core clock

12:56PM EDT - Also did some work on power management/efficiency, though now going in-depth at this time

12:56PM EDT - Raja is giving special credit to the board design team

12:57PM EDT - Joe now talking a bit more on HBM

12:58PM EDT - AMD has over the last several years been on the cutting edge of memory tech. 2015 and Fiji is no different

12:58PM EDT - HBM gets AMD more memory bandwidth, but also cuts down on memory power, giving them more power headroom for the GPU itself

12:59PM EDT - AMD will be putting HBM in more devices in the future (where costs make sense, of course)

01:00PM EDT - Raja has never been so excited in the last 20 years

01:01PM EDT - Laying the path for the future

01:01PM EDT - They see higher quality VR systems as requiring much, much more GPU performance

01:02PM EDT - The Holodeck concept and Eyefinity seems to have given way to VR and the holodeck on your head

01:03PM EDT - Joe is talking a bit about overclocking headroom. AMD says it should be a good overclocker

01:03PM EDT - Fury X goes on sale on the 24th

01:03PM EDT - $649

01:03PM EDT - Fury (vanilla) for $549 on July 14th

01:04PM EDT - Nano in the summer, dual-GPU card in the fall

01:04PM EDT - So the fight is set: Fury X needs to meet or beat NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti. AMD is aiming to best NVIDIA's top Maxwell GPU

01:05PM EDT - To close things out, Huddy is back on stage

01:05PM EDT - Will be showing the PC version of Star Wars: Battlefront

01:06PM EDT - DICE's Lead Producer (whose name I couldn't type out fast enough) is now on stage

01:07PM EDT - Frostbite engine game, so they already have all the tech Johan Andersson has been working on

01:07PM EDT - Discussing the production of the game

01:09PM EDT - Rolling PC footage

01:10PM EDT - A very short clip indeed

01:11PM EDT - AMD will have it playable at SDCC next month

01:12PM EDT - Recap time

01:13PM EDT - That's a wrap

01:14PM EDT - Thanks for joining us, everyone

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  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    You've got to admit they've got a fine sense of humor, though: "the new era of PC gaming" starts with an almost complete lineup of simple rebrands (at slightly higher clock speeds and with more memory, which they could have given us years ago). Progress on new process nodes is slowing down and costs are rising, so it's not a bad choice to protect your investment and use the existing architecture and mask sets as long as you can, with as few changes as you can get by. A new era, indeed.
  • figus77 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

    HBM tell you nothnig?
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

    That's why I wrote "almost complete lineup of simple rebrands". If there was no Fiji chip it would be simply "complete lineup of simple rebrands".
  • Mr Perfect - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    Likewise. Press conferences are pretty tedious; executives get thrust out on stage to make small talk and scripted jokes, hype all over the place, five minutes of actual news. I don't know how members of the press do it. Maybe they'll lift the NDA at the end of this show? I was really hoping for a full product review to go with lunch.
  • Sttm - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    At least throw us some performance numbers. Like BF4 "Fury vs 980ti at 4k"... thats all I wanted, but no, nothing!
  • Zak - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    That's because the benchmarks would likely not support their overblown claims.
  • Hairs_ - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    AMD clearly has a problem: both GPU and CPU lines for the last few generations have been respins/rebrands of overheated architectures on antiquated process nodes.

    Everything in the mainstream GPU segment is now a rebrand of a rebranded rebrand. If it weren't for nvidia leaving such a big hole in pricing between a 960 and a 750 they'd struggle to make sales.

    And the top end, although new, is looking like a case of "same performance in a slightly less horrible power and heat envelope" over the last generation (given all their talk here was entirely about performance per watt).

    The fact that the top end is still liquid cooled means that for all their talk of power busting focus, they're still running too hot.
  • extide - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    They said the card was 275 watts, which is comparable to top end single gpu cards from both camps. They did watercooling because they wanted to, 275 watts is easily air cooled as well.
  • Morawka - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    i dunno about easyily.. Think of these big honkin Metal coolers for i7 cpu's.. They are massive and made out of pure metal. And a CPU is only pulling 85w or less.

    These chips are dense which makes heat build up much much faster than a PSU or CPU. it's not easlily cooled. it takes a lot of surface area especially at 300w
  • angrypatm - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    made out of pure metal, not that cheap half plastic chinese metal. lol

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