AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

[FoxEye]

Am i the only person feeling like this?

In truth, what I'm most worried about is the pricing, and whether AMD decide to stick to their new "premium" brand image.

They know that this is last-chance saloon. I'm sure they still have the technical expertise to pull this off.

But if they don't deliver on all counts, it really is game over this time. Let's hope they deliver.

 

[Geeman1979]

If you look at the last round, AMD announced Fiji stuff, no one knew what was really coming, hype was massive, Overclockers were having wet dreams imagining all sorts of epicness.

Nvidia released the TitanX, followed extremely quickly by the 980ti, which offerend almost identical performance (often better) lower ram at a much lower price point.

AMD then brought out the rebards and the Fiji chips...

all round, Nvidia battered AMD bigtime,

First to market with the absolute top end = TitanX (980ti also i guess?)
First to market with the Overclockers dream = 980ti

AMD arrived late with

Whinegate on the pumps on the FuryX
Not an overclockers dreams on the Fiji
"Overpriced cos we want a premium image" on the Fiji stuff
Rebrand central on pretty much everything else

Now im not one to usually bigup Nvidia, but it seems to me they absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round the only thing coming out of AMD i find remotely decent is the Nano, i wouldnt touch a Fiji card other than that, and i wouldnt buy a Nano.

Its no wonder AMD have formed RTG to try and claw back market share, i just hope whoever was in charge of the abortion that was Fiji was sacked or at the very minimum given a job where they have zero input on GPU's ever again.

Im still boggled at the fact the current market is mainly 1080p yet AMD decided to throw its high end at the 4k (not even going to go into hdmi 2.0 or lackof) its all fine and dandy saying dont buy a FuryX for 1080p, but some people want the perceived best gpu and still havent moved from 1080p, people are odd like that, they will buy the absolute best GPU while still holding themselves back with a monitor that cant make the most use from it, it happens, more often than most people think or would like to admit.

Anyhow, i have little to zero faith now in AMD to pull one back for team Red, especially with the current Polaris news being mostly orientated towards power saving....

Am i the only person feeling like this?

Agreed ^

Summed up well.

 

[PhoenixUK]

Meanwhile... in the midst of arguments whether we need another monster card for £800 or if 16GB VRAM is not enough for next year, some people, play on integrated GPUs or aging 6970s with 2GB mem which still play a lot of games just fine on anything lower than 4k.

Oh well...

I seem to be the only person here which wouldn't mind a 0% performance increase polaris that's cheaper, half the size and runs on 80W that can be put into a nice little media box in the living room.

 

[FoxEye]

Meanwhile... in the midst of arguments whether we need another monster card for £800 or if 16GB VRAM is not enough for next year, some people, play on integrated GPUs or aging 6970s with 2GB mem which still play a lot of games just fine on anything lower than 4k.

Which is fine if you don't mind all your games looking like Minecraft, or can live with 15FPS minimums. If you really can't even afford a mid-range GPU, you're better served with a console, imho.

 

[Davedree]

If you look at the last round, AMD announced Fiji stuff, no one knew what was really coming, hype was massive, Overclockers were having wet dreams imagining all sorts of epicness.

Nvidia released the TitanX, followed extremely quickly by the 980ti, which offerend almost identical performance (often better) lower ram at a much lower price point.

AMD then brought out the rebards and the Fiji chips...

all round, Nvidia battered AMD bigtime,

First to market with the absolute top end = TitanX (980ti also i guess?)
First to market with the Overclockers dream = 980ti

AMD arrived late with

Whinegate on the pumps on the FuryX
Not an overclockers dreams on the Fiji
"Overpriced cos we want a premium image" on the Fiji stuff
Rebrand central on pretty much everything else

Now im not one to usually bigup Nvidia, but it seems to me they absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round the only thing coming out of AMD i find remotely decent is the Nano, i wouldnt touch a Fiji card other than that, and i wouldnt buy a Nano.

Its no wonder AMD have formed RTG to try and claw back market share, i just hope whoever was in charge of the abortion that was Fiji was sacked or at the very minimum given a job where they have zero input on GPU's ever again.

Im still boggled at the fact the current market is mainly 1080p yet AMD decided to throw its high end at the 4k (not even going to go into hdmi 2.0 or lackof) its all fine and dandy saying dont buy a FuryX for 1080p, but some people want the perceived best gpu and still havent moved from 1080p, people are odd like that, they will buy the absolute best GPU while still holding themselves back with a monitor that cant make the most use from it, it happens, more often than most people think or would like to admit.

Anyhow, i have little to zero faith now in AMD to pull one back for team Red, especially with the current Polaris news being mostly orientated towards power saving....

Am i the only person feeling like this?

I agree with a lot of that, it's so true of what you say and I expect you'll get the amd defence team stating you are trolling or off topic lol. I am Amd biased but yet they still attack me, but It's obvious Amd have been waiting on a die shrink rather than investing in R&d towards a new architecture on the 28nm process. In Amd's defence I do have to say I appreciate how well Tahiti and Hawaii/grenada have aged over time.

But the fact is Fiji is just too little too late.

I predicted that Amd would scale up Tonga by x2 way before anyone even though of it. I predicted the spec of the Fury 3584/4096 by doubling the specs. If you took 285 tonga scaling in cf you could estimate it's performance and Fiji performs as expected really. In the hype thread of guessing fury speed, I made some predictions about Amd need a die shrink more than Nvidia do with Gm200 and that I hopED Fury had decent front end efficiency as they will be sacrificing clockspeed, I was right too.

Whilst the Fury is as big as it in specs and die size, compare it's performance to the smaller Gm204 980/Grenada and you can see Fiji just isn't quite there.

However I do love the Nano if only Amd had released only the Nano from day one.

 

[PhoenixUK]

Which is fine if you don't mind all your games looking like Minecraft, or can live with 15FPS minimums. If you really can't even afford a mid-range GPU, you're better served with a console, imho.

Thank you for your concerns, although, my starcraft 2, hots and league of legends plays perfectly on medium settings and 60-120fps on IGPU, a 3 year old one at that whereas a new skylake or something along the lines of kaveri will be at least twice as quick.

A decent mid/high end card that's 3 year old with 2gb mem (6970 for example) will still play most newest games on medium/high apart from the stuff that's miserably optimized and runs on nothing but dual £800 gpus.

GPUs and CPUs have been moving up so quickly over the last 5 years that the developers simply can't catch and most games are console ports anyway.

Sure, you can run 16k res infinity setup and that's where £2000 spend on monster GPUs can be useful but that's a really small minority of gamers.

The majority of population plays on 2-4year old specs, and that's why, everytime you see a new game coming out - look for example at the newest blizzards upcoming title, overwatch; which is still not out for another 6 months, states recommended requirements as GTX4xx/6xx series, Radeon 4xxx/7xxx series, Phenom II X3 CPU or i5 (most likely we're talking about 2xxx 3xxx).

That's 3-5year old specs right there. You don't see a 380x or 970 mentioned anywhere.

I'd be more than happy to get 390x performance for half the price instead of of having something that's 20-30% quicker for double the price.


Also, I can guarantee you that there are more people playing minecraft in the world than there are rigs running £400+ GPUs. Many, many more.

 

[FoxEye]

Thank you for your concerns, although, my starcraft 2, hots and league of legends plays perfectly on medium settings and 60-120fps on IGPU, a 3 year old one at that whereas a new skylake or something along the lines of kaveri will be at least twice as quick.

A decent mid/high end card that's 3 year old with 2gb mem (6970 for example) will still play most newest games on medium/high apart from the stuff that's miserably optimized and runs on nothing but dual £800 gpus.

Have you actually tried some of the more demanding games?

What you've written just doesn't match at all with my experience. My 7850 struggled to play a whole host of games at 1080p/60FPS on med/high settings. It just didn't have the grunt.

The 280X I currently have does a lot better in this regard, but still dips below 60FPS on high settings in many games.

That you think an igpu is going to blast out something like Metro at 60FPS on med settings is frankly divorced from reality.

I'm sure LoL/DOTA/WoW are fine, but you don't buy a hefty GPU for those games, do you...

 

[Mtom]

If you look at the last round, AMD announced Fiji stuff, no one knew what was really coming, hype was massive, Overclockers were having wet dreams imagining all sorts of epicness.

Nvidia released the TitanX, followed extremely quickly by the 980ti, which offerend almost identical performance (often better) lower ram at a much lower price point.

AMD then brought out the rebards and the Fiji chips...

all round, Nvidia battered AMD bigtime,

First to market with the absolute top end = TitanX (980ti also i guess?)
First to market with the Overclockers dream = 980ti

AMD arrived late with

Whinegate on the pumps on the FuryX
Not an overclockers dreams on the Fiji
"Overpriced cos we want a premium image" on the Fiji stuff
Rebrand central on pretty much everything else

Now im not one to usually bigup Nvidia, but it seems to me they absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round the only thing coming out of AMD i find remotely decent is the Nano, i wouldnt touch a Fiji card other than that, and i wouldnt buy a Nano.

Its no wonder AMD have formed RTG to try and claw back market share, i just hope whoever was in charge of the abortion that was Fiji was sacked or at the very minimum given a job where they have zero input on GPU's ever again.

Im still boggled at the fact the current market is mainly 1080p yet AMD decided to throw its high end at the 4k (not even going to go into hdmi 2.0 or lackof) its all fine and dandy saying dont buy a FuryX for 1080p, but some people want the perceived best gpu and still havent moved from 1080p, people are odd like that, they will buy the absolute best GPU while still holding themselves back with a monitor that cant make the most use from it, it happens, more often than most people think or would like to admit.

Anyhow, i have little to zero faith now in AMD to pull one back for team Red, especially with the current Polaris news being mostly orientated towards power saving....

Am i the only person feeling like this?

You can have faith. Last year AMD was shafted big time.
20nm was cancelled and it was confirmed now that they wanted to bring sone gpus on it. So they had to tinker with the 300 series. Fiji was shafted with the HBM shortage, so it was late.
It was a bad year, but the node change is a fresh start, and apart from the last series they were evenly matched with nvidia in the past (apart from the NV the Apple of pc parts bias).
Also so far they showed more than NV.

 

[flopper]

However I do love the Nano if only Amd had released only the Nano from day one.

Fury presentation was messed up now and then I do think its engineers that plan that stuff instead of those marketing people.
Nano absolutly rocks with power and size and the new tech.
Best card in market.

Polaris is a bit of a reboot.
New design, die shrink, dp 1.3, HDR and so on they bring out the sun this time.

 

[Scougar]

I caved and spent 2 thirds of my graphics card fund on paintball gear lol.

 

[SiDeards73]

Ironically I'm a massive AMD fan, currently own a 290 tri-X, last cards were 290p stock edition, 280, 7870, 6950 and various AMD cards prior to those, I haven't bought an Nvidia card in about 15 years, but it's got grim lately from AMD lol

Just hope Polaris is not all about energy efficiency and actually delivers so actual jaw dropping performance at a good price point, if AMD nail that and the Zen CPU's are also on the money then they are back in the game bigtime, if they fail on one or the other I can't see them going much longer

 

[Klunt Bumskrint]

I've mentioned the "overclockers dream" statement a few times, other users have too. Has there been an actual response from AMD about this? AMDMatt?

 

[EXxx]

I seem to be the only person here which wouldn't mind a 0% performance increase polaris that's cheaper, half the size and runs on 80W that can be put into a nice little media box in the living room.

I'd be interested only if the price difference would be big
390X is at about 300£, if you give me a 200£ 8GB GPU that's within 5% performance of the 390X with some 60-100W less, I'd be around that like a horny dog. I'd probably be wondering if i should go Tri-CFX or only CFX.
But tha's not going to happen now is it, the GPU that'll replace 390X (mind, if it's on the new architecture) will be 10% better, and probably around the same price (+ better power consumption)

 

[SKILL]

I think both nvidia and AMD were caught out by the lack of (a usable) 20nm process, and they went about the interim/stopgap cards in very different ways.

AMD banked everything on HBM, which came out late and v1 arguably has a latency issue that hurts them at 1080p (along with the limited architecture which is just Tonga on steroids.).

nvidia went and stripped out all the compute stuff they could get away with and made effectively the first pure gaming cards in several generations, and it worked extremely well.

I think you could argue that the Fury X is a better long term card than the 980Ti, as resolutions increase, DX12/Vulkan become the norm and VR comes along it should start to draw level and even overtake it quite nicely. However that doesn't matter at the high end, very few people buy a high end card and then keep it for 2+ years.

If HBM had been ready 6 months earlier then AMD would've been ahead of nvidia and forced them to release the 980Ti even earlier, which lets face it they forced them to release earlier than they would've liked (they could've milked the Titan X a good few months longer than they managed).

But Polaris, now AMD are showing working hardware and nvidia aren't even showing bare chips on a demo board, everything public right now points towards AMD having a healthy lead in getting some new cards out, but who knows what level they will be marketed at.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

If you look at the last round, AMD announced Fiji stuff, no one knew what was really coming, hype was massive, Overclockers were having wet dreams imagining all sorts of epicness.

Nvidia released the TitanX, followed extremely quickly by the 980ti, which offerend almost identical performance (often better) lower ram at a much lower price point.

AMD then brought out the rebards and the Fiji chips...

all round, Nvidia battered AMD bigtime,

First to market with the absolute top end = TitanX (980ti also i guess?)
First to market with the Overclockers dream = 980ti

AMD arrived late with

Whinegate on the pumps on the FuryX
Not an overclockers dreams on the Fiji
"Overpriced cos we want a premium image" on the Fiji stuff
Rebrand central on pretty much everything else

Now im not one to usually bigup Nvidia, but it seems to me they absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round the only thing coming out of AMD i find remotely decent is the Nano, i wouldnt touch a Fiji card other than that, and i wouldnt buy a Nano.

Its no wonder AMD have formed RTG to try and claw back market share, i just hope whoever was in charge of the abortion that was Fiji was sacked or at the very minimum given a job where they have zero input on GPU's ever again.

Im still boggled at the fact the current market is mainly 1080p yet AMD decided to throw its high end at the 4k (not even going to go into hdmi 2.0 or lackof) its all fine and dandy saying dont buy a FuryX for 1080p, but some people want the perceived best gpu and still havent moved from 1080p, people are odd like that, they will buy the absolute best GPU while still holding themselves back with a monitor that cant make the most use from it, it happens, more often than most people think or would like to admit.

Anyhow, i have little to zero faith now in AMD to pull one back for team Red, especially with the current Polaris news being mostly orientated towards power saving....

Am i the only person feeling like this?

Yeah Fiji was way over hyped, was going to be a TX killer, this that and the other, but when it was finally released, you couldn't get one for months and months, they had whiney pumps, didn't overclock for toffee, were about £200+ too expensive, and they didn't even beat the 980, the TX, and the newly released Ti, just smashed it to bloody bits, was a massive let down

 

[Sacrifice]

it didn't even beat the 980

Pretty sure it did.

 

[ICDP]

Pretty sure it did.

It's revisionist history quite frankly which is normal from those from the opposing camp (happens both ways). IMHO Fury X was overhyped and the overclockers dream statement was pure marketing BS and along with the pump whine it is no surprise it is a roundly panned GPU overall compared to 980Ti. Though contrary to what he claims it was a rough match for stock 980Ti and neither 980Ti or Titan X at stock "smashed it" at 4K especially. It was and is also definitely faster than 980 at all resolutions.

Having owned 980, 980Ti, Fury X and Fury I can say the 980Ti is a better GPU overall than the Fury X but the Fury is the best price/perf given it is measurably faster than 980 for a similar price. If I wasn't tied in to Freesync (32" Samsung 4K IPS) I would have the 980Ti over all of them. When it comes down to it OC vs OC it is ~20% faster and that counts for a lot at this level.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Pretty sure it did.

He keeps saying even though about a billion people showed otherwise so I think he is trying to get people riled up for the LOLs.

 

[beany_bot]

I really hope Zen is awesome. Intel have been releasing marginally incremental junk for a while now because no one is on their heels. (The same we can expect from Nvidia if Polaris is no good). I hope Zen is really good for this reason.

 

[Ash0787]

Im still boggled at the fact the current market is mainly 1080p yet AMD decided to throw its high end at the 4k (not even going to go into hdmi 2.0 or lackof) its all fine and dandy saying dont buy a FuryX for 1080p, but some people want the perceived best gpu and still havent moved from 1080p, people are odd like that, they will buy the absolute best GPU while still holding themselves back with a monitor that cant make the most use from it, it happens, more often than most people think or would like to admit.
Am i the only person feeling like this?

I would say that to be fair it wasn't until the 2013 lineup of graphics cards that a single card could really properly saturate 1080p

Also people tend to keep monitors for quite a while, I've only used 2 monitors since CRT times ( crt was superior in almost every aspect apart from form factor ). Havent found an LED backlit monitor that I like particularly. I will switch to 4K when I can get a 4K 120hz OLED for under £1000, until then I will just use VR and my 1680 by 1050 monitor

Also I dont think AMD tried fully with the Fiji cards, it seemed like a stopgap solution and cooler master screwed them with the poor quality pumps.
290x vs 780Ti is a more accurate representation of AMDs ability.