Quote from: QuintLeo on November 18, 2016, 02:07:05 PM

Quote from: bensam1231 on November 18, 2016, 02:47:04 AM

Scrypt GPU mining ended in the fall of 14 without private kernels. x11 started up shortly there after, became unprofitable at the beginning of winter. Gridseed weren't ASICs either, the first ones weren't very profitable or good. You may have just remembered those little USB things coming out and thought 'well those were ASICs', they weren't. There were a lot of really bad ASICs. Gridseeds were never a good deal.

Unless you were running private kernels yourself, it wasn't happening.

What other algo are you looking at that's mature? Dagger doesn't count. That's a very niche scenario and it's bound almost exclusively by bus width. The GPUs never get a chance to even be close being fully utilized.

R9-290 has a 512bit bus as was already mentioned.

Who tests GPUs on sha-256? How about trying something remotely relevant to the discussion like say NeoS, Lyra2v2, or even x11. People haven't made optimized miners for Sha in years. As mentioned before if you're talking about 'theoretical usage' scenarios, video games are a very good example of that as GPUs are made to run as fast as possible on them.

Memory usage doesn't need to be about bandwidth or bus width, it could just be the total memory usage as well. Not just that, it doesn't need to be restricted JUST to throughput, it can utilize memory and still do a lot of processing on GPUs. At this point though you're just making shit up and theorycrafting again.

You can blame latency all you want, but Fury not only has a 4096 bit bus, but also gobs of memory bandwidth, it's not eight times faster then R9-290 or even twice as fast. It's not just all about memory speeds here or even latency.

The Gridseed 3355 WAS in fact an ASIC - and on scrypt it was more efficient than anything GPU based at the time by quite a bit. single side of an "80 blade" would pull 2.5 Mhash/sec at 40 watts where the best GPUs of the time were pulling less than half that at a LOT more power (7990 was an exception with it's pair of cores, it could actually manage a bit more than half the hashrate but pulled a TON more power to do so).

Dagger (ETH) isn't "bus width limited, it's memory access limited - NOT the same thing or the RX 480 wouldn't even be close to matching the R9 290 on hashrate.

For MOST usage, the Fury is a LOT faster than the R9 290 - but on ETH it's barely in the same ballpark despite the much higher "in theory" memory bandwidth. *SOMETHING* certainly keeps it uncompetative with much older cards with lower rated memory bandwidth.

ASIC in name, not in the ability to disrupt network difficulty. They were worthless when it came to a cost/performance ratio. Only thing they had was efficiency, but they hashed so little it didn't even matter.

Dagger is definitely limited by bus width with the exception of the outliers such as HBM and GDDR5-X. Cards are different, but you can sum up general performance by that. You're welcome to offer some of your amazing specs to dispute that if you wish.

Quote from: QuintLeo on November 18, 2016, 02:10:55 PM

Quote from: bensam1231 on November 18, 2016, 02:04:15 PM

(cores can't be compared across generations of cards or chip makers).

AMD cores in the GCN generations have been pretty consistant on their performance, if anything they've gotten a hair MORE efficient with generational changes.

Comparing GCN to Terrascale cores or to NVidia cores (which I've NOT DONE AT ALL, strawman comment there) is a lot more problematical.

AMD reused chips across multiple card generations, such as 2XX and 3XX. You can't compare compute cores between a Fury and a Hawaii or to different manufacturers like Nvidia. Most of the time the architecture changes with each new generation, but AMD did rebrands. I'm talking particularly about different generations of chips, not rebrands. if you want to read into that and argue rebrands go for it.

Quote from: Wolf0 on November 18, 2016, 02:57:20 PM

Let's talk about it, then. Most 290Xs (I've had three, and others report the same) clock to 1500 on the memory. 20% OC on the clock.
Most 480s can BARELY get to 2250 - which, over a stock clock of 2000, is only a 12.5% increase. Oh, yeah, and that's still on a smaller bus.

Yup. I didn't even hit on that one, but there definitely isn't more room on AMDs newer models. They made sure to tighten that up as much as possible