Tom's Hardware's AMA With AMD, In Its Entirety

Uninstalling Drivers, The Radeon HD 7750, And Kaveri At APU13

After being live for a full 24 hours, the AMD Radeon “Ask Me Anything” has officially concluded!

Major kudos to the AMD representatives who took the time out of their schedule to come and answer all the great questions our community had for them.We know this was a bit of work on their end, and we and our users are deeply appreciative of the time taken to engage with the community here at Tom’s Hardware.

For answering questions, our gratitude goes out to Robert “Thracks” Hallock for responding to users and relaying the answers of his team at AMD.An epic thanks to the AMD team for helping put this together on their end and securing the time and info required to make this happen. We're grateful for all the great answers, and our community really appreciated this opportunity to engage with you.Check out the full thread here.

Tom’s Hardware Ask Me Anything – AMD Radeon

A digest of the responses:

Q. What is the rationale for AMD using stock cooling solutions on enthusiast cards at launch when more robust and effective cooling solutions have been demonstrated by your partners and other 3rd parties resulting in superior acoustics, better heat dissipation, and potentially higher benchmarks?

A. Using a 100% reference design at launch ensures that AMD can control every facet of the initial production. It minimizes the number of variables that can "go wrong."

Q. Will Mantle support all GCN GPUs, including the low-end ones such as the HD 7730 and HD 7750?

A. Anything with Graphics Core Next. Anything!

Q. With Kavari being the 3rd generation APU from AMD, what are the major improvements that we will see? How potentially disruptive is this technology to the historic relationship of CPU/GPU and system resources in a desktop environment and how does AMD plan to leverage this potential disruption into higher market share since Nvidia and Intel don't fully compete in this APU space?

A. I can't say much on our next-generation APUs, as today's AMA team is from the Radeon side of the business. But what I can say is that your question will be answered in its entirety on November 11-13 at the AMD Developer Conference in San Jose.

Q. Why did you end the HD 7750?

A. The HD 7750 is still shipping in the market for precisely the reason you've identified. Its performance falls between that of the R7 250 and the R7 260X.

Q. My question is about changing from one Radeon card to another new Radeon card. I have gotten different descriptions of the steps to go through as far as removing old software or not, with many instructions assume starting with a new install.  Can you recommend some steps?

A.  With Windows 7, this is the procedure I have always followed in one form or another: 1) Fully uninstall the driver with the AMD Catalyst uninstaller tool found here (http://www2.ati.com/drivers/amd_cleanup_util_1.2.1.0.exe) 2) Reboot your PC! 3) Install the new driver. Reboot your PC! 4) Done!  I've never had a problem following this approach.

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  • jumpmanxt
    Does AMD have an official download link for their cleanup utility? I can't get the link in the article to work (http://www2.ati.com/drivers/amd_cleanup_util_1.2.1.0.exe).
    Reply
  • tomfreak
    I is sad.... I ask if Radeon 7790 support TrueAudio or not, my question got passed -.-

    Radeon 7790 is the same chip with 260x.
    Reply
  • ronch79
    WHy wasn't AMD asked about the future of their CPU division? Do they plan to offer FX SKUs using the Steamroller core? What about Excavator? Any plans to continue making x86 CPUs after Excavator?
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    11927410 said:
    WHy wasn't AMD asked about the future of their CPU division?
    Because the AMA panel was from the GPU division and deferred CPU-related questions to AMD's upcoming forum and interviews elsewhere. In other words, they probably were not authorized to discuss CPU-related questions.
    Reply
  • sarinaide
    Nice interview, its eye opening to see how little people in position to know actually knew about AMD and its projects. The automatic knee-jerk reaction is to assume a problem when there is no problem other than the assumption of problems.

    Reply
  • goodguy713
    well this was pretty informative actually. the temp issue with the 290 and 290x seems like it can be solved just by gaming out side in 30 degree weather.. lol
    Reply
  • goodguy713
    all joking aside i honestly think I will buy a 290 here soon been waiting for amazon to get more in stock
    Reply
  • MajinCry
    Gah. Forgot about the AMA. I'd have asked if there would be any performance benefit from wrapping, say, DirectX 9 to Mantle, due to the low-level aspect of the latter.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    11928558 said:
    Gah. Forgot about the AMA. I'd have asked if there would be any performance benefit from wrapping, say, DirectX 9 to Mantle, due to the low-level aspect of the latter.
    Sounds like a silly idea to me since the point of Mantle is to bypass DXn's complexity and overhead in the first place by giving programmers lower-level access to the hardware.

    If you make DXn libraries that translate the DXn API to Mantle, you lose pretty much all advantages Mantle is intended to provide since you have to jump through all DXn hoops on top of dealing with Mantle stuff.

    With DXn, you get: Game -> DXn APIs -> driver hardware abstraction layer -> low-level drivers -> hardware
    With Mantle, you get: Game -> Mantle -> low-level drivers -> hardware
    With "Mantlified DXn" you get: Game -> DXn API -> DXn translation layer -> Mantle -> low-level drivers -> hardware

    Converting DXn to Mantle is likely less efficient since it introduces an extra middleware layer that may not be able to execute calls as efficiently as a middleware layer that speaks native hardware language - the hardware abstraction layer has liberties in how to translate DXn calls to hardware that Mantle would not have.
    Reply
  • joditas
    This is the original version
    http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1863987/official-amd-radeon-representatives.html

    I appreciate THG for hosting this but many questions are simply left unanswered. If AMD wants to capture more market share, not just maintain, they need to do better in areas where they are lacking.
    Reply