Let's be clear on what's just happened. The RX 480 offers the same performance per watt as the 2 years old 28 nm GTX 970 in DX 11. Forget the fact that it's actually slightly slower and overclocks terribly for a moment. This is the key line:

The RX 480, a 2016 14nm GPU, offers the same performance per watt as the GTX 970, a 2 year old 28nm GPU.

Let that sink in.

The impications for Vega are profound. Forget competing with the 1080 Ti. Banish those thoughts completely. It will be a miracle if they hit 1080 performance.

Nvidia dominance is complete, and when history looks back, the card that changed everything was the GTX 970, truly the GOAT.

It isn't that earth shatteringly better than the GK110 Keplers either - some might cry foul on the comparison citing DX12 but factor in that is 3+ year old tech.

AMD better have something up their sleeve with Vega or whatever comes next.

I find it quite amusing in the perspective of previous generations where the mid-range was usually around the performance of the last generation high end - nVidia had everyone hyped up over what is realistically mid-range and stretching a point upper mid-range cards and AMD went one better and had everyone hyped up over what is realistically low end in the same generation context.

The way I see it:

AMD's newly launched midrange card has for £175 pretty much the same performance as Nvidia's last generation mid-high end card had for £300+ when it launched.

Not entirely sure why you thought this warranted it's own thread and couldn't go into one of the many others with people slating the new card because it's not the £50 Nvidia 1080 slayer they'd talked themselves into expecting. Maybe a mod can move this into one of the other threads?

Confused Stu said:

The way I see it:

AMD's newly launched midrange card has for £175 pretty much the same performance as Nvidia's last generation mid-high end card had for £300+ when it launched.

Not entirely sure why you thought this warranted it's own thread and couldn't go into one of the many others with people slating the new card because it's not the £50 Nvidia 1080 slayer they'd talked themselves into expecting. Maybe a mod can move this into one of the other threads?

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Price comparisons is pointless because the 970 launched at a different performance tier. Wait until the 1060 arrives if you are going to do a price comparisons.


And I disagree, this is a very different topic to the Polaris reviews and speculation threads. IT is hopefully a level headed discussion about the technological differences between the 2 companies and what this entails for the future. If you are not interested then simply click back and don't bother reading the thread.

I personally think AMD has given up on competing with nVidia on high end cards and are aiming for the much more lucrative lower spec market. That much was clear on the 480 launch and all the VR hype.

I do hope I am wrong as nVidia need competition in the top end of the market.

You know AMD is in the **** when their 480 uses more power than the 1070.

Fair enough to compare it to 970 performance. But we shouldn't really, we should compare it against the bracket it's upgrading from 380 and 960, and it's a massive win.

Your logic can be put into any GPU line up. Lower end, medium end catch up to highend, while highend keep getting stronger.
The RX580 for example could match 1070 or 1080 but by that time medium range has progressed the highend has already moved on.

The price and performance of the 480 is not much worse than expected but the performance per watt is pretty dire. I knew AMD's PR numbers wouldn't be reliable. I expected something around twice the performance per watt but things are worse.


However, I think there are 2 issues coming together here:
1) AMD improved architecture performance by 15% this generation (official AMD figure given to press to disseminate). this is at the low end of the historic averages. Pascal by comparison has improved things by about 25%, and they were ahead to begin with.

2) Global Foundries 14nm process is just not as good as TSMC 16nm right now.


The end results is GP104 is about 80% more efficient than the RX480, which is especially impressive considering faster cards normally see a decline in performance per watt due to diminishing returns and additional bottle necking.


There is some speculation that Polaris is actually a very delayed chip aimed at the cancelled 20nm process, and so it just isn't optimal at all. Polaris 10 should have been released with Fiji to create a while new 20nm line up, the whole plan got canned. Nvidia came out of that much better, perhaps they had better foresight of the impeding 20nm issues and took a gamble earlier int he design process.

Catanonia said:

I personally think AMD has given up on competing with nVidia on high end cards and are aiming for the much more lucrative lower spec market. That much was clear on the 480 launch and all the VR hype.

I do hope I am wrong as nVidia need competition in the top end of the market.

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I don't think they have given up at all, they just rebuilding there line up. Aiming for bigger market first, highend is coming end off this year or beginning of 2017.

I am more disappointed that AMD hasn't launched a bigger sized chip to compete and give NVidia a run at the top. I know Vega is coming, but Winter is Coming (or so they say) and I wanted to do a side by side comparison of the two big cards. I understand AMD's reasonings though and they have to go for the mass market and Gibbo did say that they had shifted 700+ in a couple of hours, so good news for AMD there at least.

I feel for AMD but they haven't really helped themselves over the years. They have made some decent CPUs but sat back and the same with GPUs and now they play second fiddle to Intel and NVidia. Hopefully they can turn it around though and give both a decent fight.

I would say Kyle Benett's article here was pretty much dead on:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_journey_in_futility#.V3Q2RugrIuU

It just seems that the only reason they put this card out as all was to bang on the "value" drum and to try and get some revenue. It really makes no sense as to why they would want to compete with a card that's now over 2 years old (gtx 970).

That's really all i can take out of the launch, they were left with a load of silicon that couldn't meet the core clocks needed so it was introduced with a slightly oddball marketing campaign. AMD did sort of do a similar thing with the 2900xt, it was introduced as being great value when at the chip level a few things apparently weren't working as intended such as enabling fsaa crippled performance, plus it was a power hog and only managed to compete with the 8800 gts.

D.P. said:

Price comparisons is pointless because the 970 launched at a different performance tier. Wait until the 1060 arrives if you are going to do a price comparisons.


And I disagree, this is a very different topic to the Polaris reviews and speculation threads. IT is hopefully a level headed discussion about the technological differences between the 2 companies and what this entails for the future. If you are not interested then simply click back and don't bother reading the thread.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. You and I obviously read the opening post differently - I read it as very inflammatory and bordering on trolling. Maybe I've just spent too much time on the forum lately reading people slating everything AMD do and am starting to see it where others don't.

My take on it then is that AMD have done exactly what they said they would do - launch their new GPU range starting with the mid-range, and Nvidia have done exactly what they set out to do by beginning the launch of their new cards with the high end. It all feels very much like declaring that Vauxhall are washed up because they launched their new Astra diesel first whereas Ford launched their new Focus with the ST model first.

All the doom and gloom predictions that this means AMD have given up, that they haven't got the technological progress to compete, and that Nvidia are obviously dominant is ridiculously premature. When both companies have their full range available, then I'm happy to compare and make predictions, but until then it's too early to read anything into it.

I think Vega will probably compete pretty well with Nvidia's 1070/1080 and Gp102.

I do think the fact the rx480 consumes more power than the 1070 is a bit of a fail, but then they were miles behind Nvidia last gen in perf/watt so I would have been surprised if they had managed to match them this time around.

Gregster said:

I am more disappointed that AMD hasn't launched a bigger sized chip to compete and give NVidia a run at the top. I know Vega is coming, but Winter is Coming (or so they say) and I wanted to do a side by side comparison of the two big cards. I understand AMD's reasonings though and they have to go for the mass market and Gibbo did say that they had shifted 700+ in a couple of hours, so good news for AMD there at least.

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But this is the point. If they made a bigger size chip, it would require more power, and it's not feasible to go past 300 watts for a single chip these days. The point is they couldn't make a bigger chip to compete with the 1070/1080, not while maintaining relatively low power and price.

I actually think targeting the mainstream market at around the $200 price point was AMD's best bet. But there are many people who think Vega will compete with big Pascal. Based on what we've seen so far, this is pure fantasy.

The next card ups Vega, you really think its going to get anywhere near the 1070/80, when the next card down in the tier, can't even topple the 970, jesus, the performance increase its going to have to have over it, to get anywhere near em, is going to have to be astronomical, never mind to topple em!

Confused Stu said:

The way I see it:

AMD's newly launched midrange card has for £175 pretty much the same performance as Nvidia's last generation mid-high end card had for £300+ when it launched.

Not entirely sure why you thought this warranted it's own thread and couldn't go into one of the many others with people slating the new card because it's not the £50 Nvidia 1080 slayer they'd talked themselves into expecting. Maybe a mod can move this into one of the other threads?

Click to expand...

My 970 was £265-270 at launch (can't quite remember).

The RX480 consumes more power because it's poorly placed on the voltage/frequency curve on the GloFo 14 nm low power node. It needed too much voltage to reach the necessary frequencies to get VR levels of performance AMD was going after with P10. The 2.8X P/W claim they made during the announcement wasn't from RX480 at all, but RX470, which will have lower voltages and better efficiency more in line with Pascal. Polaris was made mostly for P11 to fit into laptops like Apples, and at those power levels GloFos process is sufficiently competitive.

Vega is hopefully a TSMC product, and will have better efficiency and clock speeds than RX480. The Perf/W numbers compared to 1080 certainly look bad, but they might not tell the truth about rest of the Polaris or Vega lineup.

Big gap is bad news for all.

LoadsaMoney said:

The next card ups Vega, you really think its going to get anywhere near the 1070/80, when the next card down in the tier, can't even topple the 970, jesus, the performance increase its going to have to have over it, to get anywhere near, is going to have to be astronomical, never mind to topple em!

Click to expand...

You have to remember there will be two vega chips. I think it is quite feasible that one is at 1070 perf or more and one might be close to gp102 levels.

Never mind Polaris, I think NVidia have got some explaining to do.

The pics below I have just copied off the Futuremark site and are bang up to date.

Anyone notice anything odd about them ?







Answer, where are the Pascal cards ?

I know these results are produced using LN2 but the question still stands, why are last gen Maxwell cards beating newer Pascal cards ?