AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

[maonayze]

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 wonder what your reason for throwing this into an AMD thread was? Clickbait perhaps? Maybe a nice new round of benchmarks is needed with the newer AMD drivers in place.

I love how you use the words "absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round" which are completely over the top and do not equate to a few frames per second in differing games. To be honest we are no different to where we have always been - each manufacturers top end cards trading blows back and forth in various games depending on who has got their claws into the developers to incorporate their code.

I do agree on the fact that the Fiji cards were priced too high due to this "Premium Brand" crap, coz that's not where I want AMD/RTG to be. I am a bang for buck man and always will be...no matter who the card is made by.

If you are so disappointed by AMD then go green next time round. Each to their own. You pays yer money and takes yer chance....

 

[Stanners]

I wonder what your reason for throwing this into an AMD thread was? Clickbait perhaps? Maybe a nice new round of benchmarks is needed with the newer AMD drivers in place.

There are plenty of benchmark threads already people can contribute to as I am sure a lot of people would be interested in seeing the improvements you hint at.

 

[flopper]

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.

How was FuryX overhyped?
The pump wasnt AMD directly as it had to do with the thirdparty manufacturer messing up.
The statement with OC dream was from a guy from AMD being drunk and High and had nothing to do with AMD marketing the furyX last I checked.

4k the FuryX single and crossfire is a better option than TitanX and the 980ti.
Lot of kids buy with a 1080p screen cards that isnt fit for the resolution and made for it.

so here you state things that isnt true and make others trying to belive they are true to fit your bias about nvidia so how is that fair or even remotly true presentation?

Its not.

If you run a double bind test without knowing what card did run the game you wouldnt know the difference. So what then influence your buy that simply put create bias without really being tied to the experience itself?
I buy single cards due to trying dual cards its evident the techncial issues with sli and crossfire are for me reason enough to buy a single card in whatever resolution and game I play.

I dont buy dual or more cards as I really care about my own gaming experience and the main reason I buy AMD cards.
Great price with the performance as in actual practice you wont notice difference between a few fps anyhow.
I recall the day when people did run ddr memory with tight timings and I just checked what do you get as performance from them and the answer was, zero, only in benchmarks and I dont play benchmarks or surf benchmarks.

I use my computer and I cant say how cool it is to own AMD hardware as I know the CEO at least wont lie to my face as the ceo of Nvidia does.
Thats my bias for sure but I take full responsability with that and refuse to buy hardware from Nvidia when being lied to from the guy in charge.
There is no excuse from that behaviour and that people accept that is beyond me.

Everyone who buys nvidia hardware support such behaviour and for me its not excusable.

 

[Orangey]

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.

There might be a 4K120 OLED coming from Dell (no less) for £3000, the price may plummet quickly however. So perhaps (late) this year we could be looking at endgame for monitors.

With new GPUs the high end looks to be exclusively 4K as early as next year and that will become the new "good enough" rez.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Fiji cost a lot because it was the first HBM product, interposer, HBM and a 600mm^2 chip to begin with. It was exceptionally expensive to make and yet was cheaper than comparable Nvidia parts, premium pricing.

If you compare the price of a 600mm^2 core and the same size core on an interposer with HBM instead of GDDR5 you're talking probably a 20-30% cost increase at least, yet AMD were basically cheaper than a 980ti with comparable cooling.... Fiji upmarked for a premium level margin would have cost 20+% more than it did.

 

[Mauller]

TBH i would not be surprised if AMD were losing money on every fiji they produced. Mainly due to it being a pipe-cleaner card in the long run.

 

[FoxEye]

I love how you use the words "absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round" which are completely over the top and do not equate to a few frames per second in differing games. To be honest we are no different to where we have always been

Until you start looking at market share... then words like "smashed" don't seem so far-fetched.

Not that this is a good thing - of course it isn't. AMD need to get back into the game, for all our sakes.

 

[Mei]

i dont think AMD is able to price war NVidia with its current design, i think their cards cost a lot more to produce
without being a techno nerd i cant tell you exactly why but i believe so lol

so we hoping their next design can either be produced cheaper or be a lot faster than NVidia, it cant not be both!

i hope they can make something small for the mobile market too, gfx performance on 'ultra books' is pretty lame for 2016, hardly being able to play minecraft on a $3000 machine...pfff

 

[Gregster]

Until you start looking at market share... then words like "smashed" don't seem so far-fetched.

Not that this is a good thing - of course it isn't. AMD need to get back into the game, for all our sakes.

True that. AMD got their back doors well and truly smashed in by Nvidia this round. Hopefully next round will even things up a bit.

 

[Mei]

the timing of the TI release and the numbers they had of them produced was pretty shady lol

went well for them tho!, i didnt even see much backlash from TX owners

 

[FoxEye]

i hope they can make something small for the mobile market too, gfx performance on 'ultra books' is pretty lame for 2016, hardly being able to play minecraft on a $3000 machine...pfff

Minecraft is a bad example since it doesn't use your GPU anyhow

 

[Gregster]

the timing of the TI release and the numbers they had of them produced was pretty shady lol

went well for them tho!, i didnt even see much backlash from TX owners

Yer. The whole of the Fiji release was a bit of a mess up really.

 

[Mei]

well there wasnt even stock for ages
there's no way AMD expected good sales

haha ok @ foxeye but you know what i mean!
we got budget intel chips that have dp 4k out but are just too slow to do it
and that weak nvidia gpu in the surface book

i think microsoft needs amd to be competitive in that space, if you want something with a nice screen its a ultrabook or a tab s

 

[humbug]

Fiji was probably designed for 20nm, the 20nm that didn't happen in the end so it had to be shoehorned into 28nm which it was never designed for.

They probably started work on Polaris as soon as they knew 20nm was not going to happen.

This time it looks like they might come good given they have a working Chip already thats 3 times the performance per watt of maxwell.

 

[PhoenixUK]

Have you actually tried some of the more demanding games?...

You obviously didn't read my post carefully, obviously there are a few games which are badly optimized (not necessarily same thing as demanding) that run awfully bad on anything and I never said that IGPU will play each brand new top game perfectly - it will however play a large number of games. So will a low end £100 card.

What did I say however, is that a 2-3year old mid/high end GPU will run just about everything you throw it at it, maybe with one or two sliders lowered a bit for the extremely demanding or badly optimized games. Therefore, if a 3year old £200-250GPU can run almost all games for the large majority of gamers on the planet, the hype about the newest £600GPU being 5-10% quicker or slower than the one that came out 6 months before seems to me a bit pointless.

I just wish they stopped focusing on the 'who has the fastest card in the world' race and instead made more affordable and better designed products.
The GPUs have been getting more and more expensive each year for the last 6- 7 years ever since they started coming up with those pointless and overpriced monster cards.

The same pointless "is this new £500 card 5-10% faster than last one" argument comes up every 6-8 months.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You obviously didn't read my post carefully, obviously there are a few games which are badly optimized (not necessarily same thing as demanding) that run awfully bad on anything and I never said that IGPU will play each brand new top game perfectly - it will however play a large number of games. So will a low end £100 card.

What did I say however, is that a 2-3year old mid/high end GPU will run just about everything you throw it at it, maybe with one or two sliders lowered a bit for the extremely demanding or badly optimized games. Therefore, if a 3year old £200-250GPU can run almost all games for the large majority of gamers on the planet, the hype about the newest £600GPU being 5-10% quicker or slower than the one that came out 6 months before seems to me a bit pointless.

I just wish they stopped focusing on the 'who has the fastest card in the world' race and instead made more affordable and better designed products.
The GPUs have been getting more and more expensive each year for the last 6- 7 years ever since they started coming up with those pointless and overpriced monster cards.

The same pointless "is this new £500 card 5-10% faster than last one" argument comes up every 6-8 months.

Agreed.

 

[SiDeards73]

I love how you use the words "absolutely smashed AMD apart the last round" which are completely over the top and do not equate to a few frames per second in differing games. To be honest we are no different to where we have always been - each manufacturers top end cards trading blows back and forth in various games depending on who has got their claws into the developers to incorporate their code.

Sorry, i should have been clearer, one only has to look at market share now, and AMD's ever dwindling percentage to Nvidia ever increasing percentage....

Now if that is not Nvidia smashing AMD to bits im not sure what is? both are companies in business to make money, seems Nvidia are making truck loads more than AMD, to me that means NVdia are smashing AMD to bits.

And i will still buy AMD because im a muppet like that, im an eternal optomist and a believer that David can overthrow Goliath, i still pay money to AMD for their often inferior product in the hope one day i will be rewarded with a much better return for my dosh, the hope is still alive.... just.

Im sorry if this is not what you and other AMD fans want to hear, but its the cold hard facts, the truth is AMD have been on a slide for a long while, and while they once again come with these fantabulous ideas of a gaming GPU nirvana, i and many other AMD fans have been burnt by their actual products (seriously, i burnt my fingers on my 290p ref one time, true story) inability to actually deliver what the hype supposed to promise.

I really really want AMD to pull it off, but if you get let down enough by something sooner or later you lose respect and trust.

 

[humbug]

Sid it's the provocative wording you use. It makes you look like an adolescent fanboi trying to start something.

 

[Ash0787]

There might be a 4K120 OLED coming from Dell (no less) for £3000, the price may plummet quickly however. .

I know I really really want it

but I'm not sure it was intended for mass production. Have not seen any gamer people that have bought one yet, maybe it not release yet ?
seem like the perfect product for somebody like Linus Sebastion

I think it might inspire competitors to release similar products and create a market, thats what I hope


At the moment I am torn between getting another fury x when the price inevitably drops in a few monthes, or just going straight to pascal or polaris for the 16nm and likely extra VRAM.
I need 2 cards with backplates on to finish my water loop, I just have 1 fury x with no backplate and soft tube going downwards at the moment

 

[Zeed]

Gregster in my eyes it was not mess up .. it was a ****ing disaster...
1. Undercut them with with 980ti by a month (remember those ware supposed to come 3 months later than they did)
2. People that have not gotten 980ti waiting for Fiji could not buy them day one cause out of stock
3. They finally got them and pumps ware ****ed
4. Overclockers dream that after MONTHS turned out to be a DREAM !!!!!

I waited so much for that card after my geforce 440mx i only had ATI and AMD cards after his 9700 pro i wanted to change that 290x for Fiji. I regret not buying 980ti when it came out and waiting for voltage control on Fiji as i still was hoping for Overclockers dream.

AMD needs to pull a rabit out of a hat now with Polaris to convince me now. Needs to deliver and overclock like a beast. First thing i love about NV is that i can edit my bios on card like i used to on my old ati/amd cards. More fun tweaking the card.