AMD forgot a lot of their customers

[mattyc123]

I think it is quite a good strategy apart from aspirations of the customer not being accounted for. it might be that the PC industry isn't the same as the automotive industry ( in which I have worked for 15years) where the high end come first to give the customer something to aspire too. This is a normal strategy for a good few markets, the customer can't afford the high end item but they can have one that is 80% as good in their price range
Nvidia and Intel need some very strong competition otherwise the price of high end parts will skyrocket and will probably kill off the enthusiast market altogether. So I hope that AMD don't just stick to mainstream market.

 

[malachi]

AMD releases at the low end first, everybody complains. Nvidia releases at the high end first, nobody gives a ****.

Go figure.

People did complain about Nvidia's high end being over priced.

 

[Meaker]

Since you've been really assy about it, how about we examine your logic.

It's called the 480. OK, so what should its performance be relative to the 390? Should it be better, worse, or about the same?

That's right. There's no answer. The name is almost meaningless.

Shall we also take the time to remember that AMD and indeed nVidia have changed their naming scheme multiple times?

Example: do you remember the 6870? Tell me, just by the name alone, was it a replacement for the 5870?

Now let's stop with the "it's a 480 so it was never going to be better than a 390" nonsense.

The performance should be a market segment higher than the previous generation launch card at the price of the same one.

480 should perform like a 390/390x
7870 should perform like a 6950/6970
6870 should perform like a 5850/5870
5770 should perform like a 4850/4870

Anything less is a down trend, anything more is an up trend.

The 6870 landed between the 5850 and 5870 at launch just like the 480 landed between the 390 and 390x.

From anandtech:

The answer is that you don’t, at least not right away. With AMD’s choice of names in mind, Barts and the 6800 series isn’t the true successor to Cypress; but it is the next generation of Radeon for another market. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great product line though – in fact that’s far from it.

The 6800 series hits the one market segment that AMD couldn’t reach with either the 5800 series or the 5700 series: the $200 market. As we said back in July when we crowned the GTX 460 the $200 king, the most successful chips are those chips that are designed from the get-go for the market they’re being sold in. The GTX 460 succeeded where the Cypress could not, as the penalty for using a harvested Cypress chip for that market was too severe and AMD had little else to work with.

A strong $200 is required so they have been developing a chip for it specially since the 6xxx series.

Could people stop having the memory of a gold fish now or at least bother to read up on gpu history?

 

[Scougar]

AMD haven't forgotten anyone. They have a high performing product coming out later this year.

The problem was people thought the 480 was going to be better, thanks to the hype. Heck, even I got caught up in it an I tried to be careful and ignore WCCF.

 

[SiDeards73]

I will admit I got caught in the hype a bit that the 480 would soundly trounce my 290, it was after Sapphire Edd stream a week or so back that I realised this would not be the case.

My main gripe is we are relying on rumours yet again on when we can expect an upgrade to a 290 tier product.

I wish AMD would break with tradition and release atleast a rough estimate of when we can expect the higher tier stuff?

It's not going to panic Nvidia as they have that segment all to themselves and sewn up currently.

I bet you ask most AMD higher end enthusiast fans and they will all agree lack of information from AMD on products prior to launch should be improved.

Look at Microsoft with Project Scorpio, we already know a ton of detail on it this is a year and a half before it's released

 

[flopper]

So now the dust has settled on the 480 a little with it being obvious that the card is not intended for anyone owning one of their 290 and upwards cards, even the AIB ones will probably not be any form of significant upgrade.



Just wondering if I am alone feeling like this?

Thats the FuryX then.
you can upgrade to that.
The amount of people having midrange cards wont upgrade until a much better card reaches the same price levels.
That wont happen and any worthy upgrade will be in the 700$ range with the newer node.
excellent prices on the fury line which would be a worthy upgrade if your on the 970/980 or 290 series

 

[SiDeards73]

Thats the FuryX then.
you can upgrade to that.
The amount of people having midrange cards wont upgrade until a much better card reaches the same price levels.
That wont happen and any worthy upgrade will be in the 700$ range with the newer node.
excellent prices on the fury line which would be a worthy upgrade if your on the 970/980 or 290 series

Sorry but no, the FuryX is junk, i wouldnt touch it with a bargepole, its been proven that its performance is underpar below 4k resolution, i game at 1440p 144hz now, so want a card thats going to max that, so i will wait on Vega..

Fiji was and still is abysmal.

 

[old gamer]

I will admit I got caught in the hype a bit that the 480 would soundly trounce my 290, it was after Sapphire Edd stream a week or so back that I realised this would not be the case.

My main gripe is we are relying on rumours yet again on when we can expect an upgrade to a 290 tier product.

I wish AMD would break with tradition and release atleast a rough estimate of when we can expect the higher tier stuff?

It's not going to panic Nvidia as they have that segment all to themselves and sewn up currently.

I bet you ask most AMD higher end enthusiast fans and they will all agree lack of information from AMD on products prior to launch should be improved.

Look at Microsoft with Project Scorpio, we already know a ton of detail on it this is a year and a half before it's released

i think i agree with you about the information, with only rumor to go on is there a reason no fury x are in stock and only one make of fury.

 

[Griffildur]

AMD releases at the low end first, everybody complains. Nvidia releases at the high end first, nobody gives a ****.

Go figure.

it's pretty obvious that 1080 and 1070 are mid range, ti and titan will be top end.

 

[ICDP]

Sorry but no, the FuryX is junk, i wouldnt touch it with a bargepole, its been proven that its performance is underpar below 4k resolution, i game at 1440p 144hz now, so want a card thats going to max that, so i will wait on Vega..

Fiji was and still is abysmal.

I think you allowed the hype for 480 to get too much (as did many of us) but this hype was self generated. In hindsight AMD always claimed they would bring VR to the mainstream market and that's exactly what they did. Now just like you I would like to see AMDs higher end stuff ASAP but I was never expecting it before Oct. It is not AMDs fault you or anyone else expected more than what they said they would deliver.

On your second point. The BS about Fiji being abysmal, well that pure nonsense. It roughly matches 980Ti at 1440p in DX11 and beats it in DX12. While that may not be the case after overclocking Fiji with voltage control can get ~10% extra performance (even more with Fiji Pro starting at 1000MHz).

What you are doing is projecting your anger at AMD for some perceived act on their part. AMD didn't let you down, your overhyping of 480 did and now you are making angry statements that are not based on facts.

You are normally a lot more reasoned with your posts.

 

[Seanspeed]

I think you allowed the hype for 480 to get too much (as did many of us) but this hype was self generated.

Some of it was, a lot of it wasn't. Between all the rumors and even AMD's referencing the 4850/4870, there was plenty of external hype building.

And really, 390X performance minimum was not too much to expect whatsoever.

 

[maonayze]

Sorry but no, the FuryX is junk, i wouldnt touch it with a bargepole, its been proven that its performance is underpar below 4k resolution, i game at 1440p 144hz now, so want a card thats going to max that, so i will wait on Vega..

Fiji was and still is abysmal.

Well as you can see from my sig I have a Sapphire Fury Tri-X and I personally think it's a damn good card. Plays games great and they run smooth on my Freesync Monitor. If SK-Hynix could have been able to put 8GB of Vram onto HBM1 then yes, it would probably have been better and I also think it should have been a little cheaper. Unfortunately, that didn't happen but I definately do not think that Fiji was junk....an experiment, yes absolutely. Junk....No, that is incredibly harsh IMHO. The Fury (non-X) gained quite a bit of performance with driver updates since release and will continue to do so for a few years, so no complaints from me. This card will find it's way into my sons machine when I upgrade so a good few years left in it yet.

As for 290 owners complaining about not having anything worthy of an upgrade to buy at this moment....We ALL knew that Vega wasnt due until Q1 2017....AMD have told us months ago of the release schedule and stuck to it. It is only people on these forums that have said anything different and that also includes the performance speculations. This, I think is one of the main problems with these forums....everyone speculates and then a bit further down the line those speculations somehow are translated into AMD fact...even though AMD have never said anything.

I'm happy with my Fury and looking towards Vega/Zen, hoping that they can pull something out of the bag. The 480's seem to be selling well and I am hoping the AIBs can pull a bit more performance from the chips to get them to the 980/390X levels we were all hoping for.

Somewhere down the line though, we are all hoping for AMD/RTG to produce an absolutely storming card that gets us all excited....I am not sure if they will/will not be able to do this but I am keeping my fingers crossed for the bigger dies (That 480 is only 232mm and the 1070/80 is 314mm).

If they don't do much with Vega then I think confidence in them to do anything to compete in the high end will dwindle rapidly IMHO. Let's hope not.

 

[meldarthx]

Oft repeated, but is it even true?

Their marketshare plummetted fairly recently iirc, after they kept either releasing only rebranded cards, or failed experiment cards at prices well above normal.

When they had decent cards vs the competition, sure they might not have had 50/50 marketshare, but they weren't at the all-time low they faced since the Fury and 300 series release.

The 300 series was a particular disappointment for everybody who actually wanted to buy an AMD card. There was nothing new in the whole range. Even price/perf stayed stagnant.

Do you really want to blame consumers for AMD's fortunes? Confidence in them is low for a reason. In the last couple years they've done nothing of real note, and made many terrible decisions.

Coupled with that their marketing is frankly shocking for a multi-billion pound company. Their events have been awful, their dissemination of information has often been confusing and generally poor.

Blaming consumers for AMD's ills is a little unfair.

you're mixing 200 series and 300 series up. 200 series because of not a great ref cooler - long time for aftermarket coolers....gave 200 series a poor image...

300 series fixed that and sold very well - got them market share back; while Fury series wasn't great it still sold fairly well - and allowed AMD to learn a lot on integration with HBM memory.

Their marketing has been terrible; but seems with the revamping of the graphics department - things are at least looking up - AMD's using social media a lot better - yep I do say 480 launch at least at our end could have been a lot better.

For performance and price - its a hell of a card......how far it will stretch its legs with aftermarket cards.....is something we still need to see.

 

[SiDeards73]

Not for me, the Fiji was massively overpriced for the performance it delivered, a lot of the problem was probably that it was up against the 980ti, arguably the best card of its generation.

The whole HBM thing was a positive but the actual fiji implementation was abysmal...

Pumps that whined horrendously
The fact it required an AIO for very little performance gain

Then you had that presentation with "Overclockers dream" and Not wanting to be the "Budget Brand"...

It was all a massive joke, im a massive AMD Fan and have only bought their cards for approx 12-15 years now, but that Fiji debacle was utter nonsense, sure they may be half decent now, but now Nvidia have a new gen of cards that smash the Fiji series into pieces... Its all very well saying AMD Cards age well, yeah thats nice and all, but the competition consistently beats AMD in all areas unfortunately, would be nice for a change for AMD to actually smash Nvidia to bits.

The only positive i personally see from Fiji was the Nano, the Fury and FuryX were both massively overpriced for the performance they offered at release.

Again you cannot rely on the drivers bringing you ahead a year or more later, infact id ask the question why do you have to wait a year for better performance? surely that should have been there from the start? refining performance over time is great, but you shouldnt have to look at a product and say "Ok its mediocre now but in a years time its going to be great" not when the competition are great now already...

 

[nashathedog]

No need for very fast GPU's as ultra game settings is only used for taking screenshots...Well that what Sapphire Ed said..

Watch from 44minutes

That's pretty sad, I've only seen Ed once before and liked the interview but a lot of what he's saying here is rubbish, As an AMD only Sapphire employee I suppose he's stuck regarding what to say. I play everything on Ultra if the cards capable of it, I'm back playing Dying light at the moment and with every setting as high as it goes bar the motion blur and film grain stuff that's off my Fury happily trudges along in the 70's which is great. A worst case scenario is 30 fps minimums, As a rule I want minimums to stay closer to 50 so to say gaming with low 30 minimums is a good target is wrong.

 

[nashathedog]

Not for me, the Fiji was massively overpriced for the performance it delivered, a lot of the problem was probably that it was up against the 980ti, arguably the best card of its generation.

The whole HBM thing was a positive but the actual fiji implementation was abysmal...

Pumps that whined horrendously
The fact it required an AIO for very little performance gain

Then you had that presentation with "Overclockers dream" and Not wanting to be the "Budget Brand"...

It was all a massive joke, im a massive AMD Fan and have only bought their cards for approx 12-15 years now, but that Fiji debacle was utter nonsense, sure they may be half decent now, but now Nvidia have a new gen of cards that smash the Fiji series into pieces... Its all very well saying AMD Cards age well, yeah thats nice and all, but the competition consistently beats AMD in all areas unfortunately, would be nice for a change for AMD to actually smash Nvidia to bits.

I suspect AMD may have a problem getting a high end part out - if you look at he 480 they've pushed that silicon hard, there's little headroom for overclocking, it runs hot and their cooler is noisey. That's for 2014 performance. They need twice as much performance to get a high end part, maybe their 14nm isn't upto this yet. We've already seen win the last gen that FuryX was hot, had a unreliable liquid cooler and didn't clock well - if Vega is the same it'll be a similarly under selling card.

The 1070 uses less power than the 480 and gives a good 50% or more performance.

It's weird they've chosen not to keep the previous gen high end chips available though in the mean time as well. AMDa portfolio is looking pretty bare.

The only positive i personally see from Fiji was the Nano, the Fury and FuryX were both massively overpriced for the performance they offered at release.

Again you cannot rely on the drivers bringing you ahead a year or more later, infact id ask the question why do you have to wait a year for better performance? surely that should have been there from the start? refining performance over time is great, but you shouldnt have to look at a product and say "Ok its mediocre now but in a years time its going to be great" not when the competition are great now already...

I agree with a lot of this, The pump whine is why a lot of us did not end up getting Fury X's, My experience with the Sapphire Fury Tri-x has been excellent apart from the odd occasion where only having 4gb's of memory mattered and that is it's Achilles heel. AMD really needed to raise there game this time around.

I suspect AMD may have a problem getting a high end part out

This has looked to be the case for a while, I think the truth is there not in the game this gen, So the best they could do was aim at this level, the saddest bit is they didn't even do that very well, Let's hope they get it together next time, Sure Vega isn't even out yet but looking at how the cards lie I'm betting it's a 1080 card at best.

 

[ICDP]

Some of it was, a lot of it wasn't. Between all the rumors and even AMD's referencing the 4850/4870, there was plenty of external hype building.

And really, 390X performance minimum was not too much to expect whatsoever.

Oh I totally agree that AMD did make some silly statements that enabled most of us to generate hype. Indeed I realistically expected R9 390X speeds and with some overclocking around R9 Nano performance and that might be possible with AIB versions. I am not impressed by reference 8GB 480 but the 4GB version at £175 is by far the best perf/price GPU by a long way.

So a mixed bag and I do not absolve AMD totally but a statement referencing 48x0 range does not mean they overpromised and under delivered. Looking at the actual press releases from AMD they always stated VR ready GPUs from $200 and they delivered that. Any other expectations were generated by the community.

The same thing happened with 1080 and 1070 being claimed by many as going to be £400 and £300 respectively. This crap happens with each GPU release, people getting angry over this is understandable but it's not AMDs fault people expected 480 to match Fury Pro when it was never touted to be that level.

 

[eddyr]

AMD should stay away from AIO coolers for the mass market. QC is never be up to the job, it isn't even that good for mass market AIB fan models. Plenty of whiny and intrusive fan cooled cards out there.

 

[Seanspeed]

Oh I totally agree that AMD did make some silly statements that enabled most of us to generate hype. Indeed I realistically expected R9 390X speeds and with some overclocking around R9 Nano performance and that might be possible with AIB versions. I am not impressed by reference 8GB 480 but the 4GB version at £175 is by far the best perf/price GPU by a long way.

So a mixed bag and I do not absolve AMD totally but a statement referencing 48x0 range does not mean they overpromised and under delivered. Looking at the actual press releases from AMD they always stated VR ready GPUs from $200 and they delivered that. Any other expectations were generated by the community.

The same thing happened with 1080 and 1070 being claimed by many as going to be £400 and £300 respectively. This crap happens with each GPU release, people getting angry over this is understandable but it's not AMDs fault people expected 480 to match Fury Pro when it was never touted to be that level.

Interesting you dont think people should be angry over Nvidia's pricing!

Anyways, I wouldn't be *angry* with AMD, but I think it's fair to be disappointed that it wasn't faster than it is. It's not about what AMD claimed, it's about the fact that we've got a 1.5x node jump plus a *supposedly* significant architectural upgrade, and the top Polaris cant even match the top Hawaii card. Such generational jumps typically bring far better gains. I was expecting it to be *at least* 390X level, and likely a bit more. This was also supported by them saying it was a 5.7TF card.

 

[Meaker]

Interesting you dont think people should be angry over Nvidia's pricing!

Anyways, I wouldn't be *angry* with AMD, but I think it's fair to be disappointed that it wasn't faster than it is. It's not about what AMD claimed, it's about the fact that we've got a 1.5x node jump plus a *supposedly* significant architectural upgrade, and the top Polaris cant even match the top Hawaii card. Such generational jumps typically bring far better gains. I was expecting it to be *at least* 390X level, and likely a bit more. This was also supported by them saying it was a 5.7TF card.

I think you need to read my post above about previous mid tier cards that line up exactly

Stop thinking you know what the previous trends are with rose tinted glasses and actually look at the benchmarks for the mid tier cores.