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*** Proper 390X review & discussion thread ***

AlamoX said:
apparently they boost the compute of all the line up by 5-10%, without overclock and with same power draw or slightly lesser, and with that double the Memory, to be honest it's not that bad, most reviews put 390X performance over 980's, which wasn't the case for the 290.
and performance goes toward AMD as the resolution goes up, not bad at all, but still not cheap enough for a rebrand to make it a nobrainer choice.
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But, allegedly, you can mod the new 300 series drivers to work on 200 series cards, and get a boost in performance... The cards themselves are nothing new at all.
 
FoxEye said:
But, allegedly, you can mod the new 300 series drivers to work on 200 series cards, and get a boost in performance... The cards themselves are nothing new at all.
Click to expand...

iv been trying to find a chart i read earlier, it shows the teraflops difference between 300 & 200 series, but cant find it anymore QQ, i need to learn to bookmark links...i will post the link if i stumble on it again
 
According to reviews the 390 would be a good upgrade for me as I only have a 7950 and game at 1080p.:)

I may hold out for the Fury and Nano though simply for sheer power and if I ever decide to go to 4K in the future.

Very tempted to buy a 390 just to play with, as they are not too expensive.
 
Not sure what to think of these really.

I'm looking to upgrade my old 580 to something a bit (lot!) newer. Not really sure if it's worth going for one of these, or getting a 970 at closer to £250 and saving the £100 difference.
 
FoxEye said:
But, allegedly, you can mod the new 300 series drivers to work on 200 series cards, and get a boost in performance... The cards themselves are nothing new at all.
Click to expand...

That's an unsubstantiated rumour afaik.

Anandtech talked to AMD themselves and they report the 390X is tweaked in some way.

Last but certainly not least however, we want to talk a bit more about the performance optimizations AMD has been working on for the 390 series. While we’re still tracking down more details on just what changes AMD has made, AMD had told us that there are a number of small changes from the 290 series to the 390 series that should improve performance by several percent on a clock-for-clock, apples-to-apples basis. That means along with the 20% memory clockspeed increase and 5% GPU clockspeed increase, we should see further performance improvements from these lower-level changes, which is also why we can’t just overclock a 290X and call it a 390X.

So what are those changes? From our discussions with AMD, we have been told that the clock-for-clock performance gains comes from a multitude of small factors, things the company has learned from and been able to optimize for over the last 2 years. AMD did not name all of those factors, but there were a couple of optimizations in particular that were pointed out.

The first optimization is that AMD has gone back and refined their process for identifying the operating voltages of Hawaii chips, with the net outcome being that Hawaii voltages should be down a hair, reducing power and/or thermal throttling. The second optimization mentioned is that the 4Gb GDDR5 chips being used offer better timings than the 2Gb chips, which can depending on the timings improve various aspects of memory performance. Most likely AMD has reinvested these timing gains into improving the memory clockspeeds, but until we get our hands on a 390X card we won’t know for sure.
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DAnDan said:
Not sure what to think of these really.

I'm looking to upgrade my old 580 to something a bit (lot!) newer. Not really sure if it's worth going for one of these, or getting a 970 at closer to £250 and saving the £100 difference.
Click to expand...

Neither do I really. I am a bit on the fence actually, but I do see some positives in it. For example, the 390 has comparable performance to the 970 and also trades blows with the 980. Having two of these would be great to have in crossfire for 1440p with the 8GB VRAM. Having said all that, if the Fury costs the price of two 390's and offers the same performance it would probably be worth going for that with better thermals and power draw.
 
AlamoX said:
iv been trying to find a chart i read earlier, it shows the teraflops difference between 300 & 200 series, but cant find it anymore QQ, i need to learn to bookmark links...i will post the link if i stumble on it again
Click to expand...

http://videocardz.com/56676/amd-officially-introduces-radeon-300-caribbean-islands-series

The AMD Caribbean Islands Family: Not Just a Rebrand (..)

AMD has been hard at work over the past year-and-a-half optimizing and re-architecting the microcontrollers within the ASICs themselves. Combined with the improvements to their manufacturing process, AMD has been able to squeeze more performance out of each of their cards and increase performance while maintaining the same price tier as its predecessor.

  • The R9 390 and R9 390X replace the R9 290 and R9 290X and are both 300 GFLOPS faster than their predecessors (5,100 GFLOPS and 5,900 GFLOPS respectively) without increasing power in typical workloads.
  • The R9 380 also benefits from the maturing of the 28nm process technology and AMD’s optimizations. It gains roughly 200 GFLOPS in performance: from 3,290 GFLOPS to 3,480 GFLOPS in compute performance.
  • The R7 370’s compute capability of 2,000 GFLOPS is also faster by 200 GFLOPS than its predecessor’s (R7 265) 1,800 GFLOPS.
  • The R7 360 has a compute performance of 1,610 GFLOPS, slightly more than the 1,536 GFLOPS of the R7 260.

In all cases, AMD increased performance and also added many features that previous generations did not have. Some of those features are enabled through the driver and others are done in hardware. But all of the GPUs listed above will support DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle graphics APIs.
Click to expand...
 
Yes but a lot of that % increase is due to clock bumps... it's great that they've been able to improve power consumption, and it's great that they've enabled some stuff in the drivers that wasn't enabled (and won't be?!) for 200 series cards (tho it could be??).

And given how other sites are reporting that the silicon is exactly the same, why should anyone trust Videocardz saying that the hardware is different? Not exactly the go to site for trusted information, is it?
 
Nutella33 said:
The hardocp review also point to greatly improved tessellation performance on the witcher "apples apples" paragraph
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http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTQzNDYxMjU0OWwxR0JRekpFNXFfM180X2wuZ2lm

We ran two separate tests here because we couldn't believe how much faster the MSI R9 390X was over the R9 290X, but it was that much faster. It comes much closer to GTX 980 performance in this game, and that is with HairWorks enabled in both tests above. There just might be something to that improvement in tessellation performance noted in the introduction.
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The sentence in question:

AMD Radeon 300 Series Graphics fully support Microsoft DirectX 12, with the following enhancements over earlier products, Faster Tessellation, Tiled Resources – Support for massive virtual textures, enabling dynamic loading of tiles into graphics RAM for expansive game world details
Click to expand...

We need people to do more specific testing.
 
This card looks really good from reviews. At 1440p+ it seems to be a tad better than the 980. It's a shame the price isn't slightly lower though. The MSI 390X is also cooled very well according to reviews staying well under 80 degrees, and it has good overclocking potential. At £350, it seems like a solid purchase.
 
FoxEye said:
Yes but a lot of that % increase is due to clock bumps... it's great that they've been able to improve power consumption, and it's great that they've enabled some stuff in the drivers that wasn't enabled (and won't be?!) for 200 series cards (tho it could be??).

And given how other sites are reporting that the silicon is exactly the same, why should anyone trust Videocardz saying that the hardware is different? Not exactly the go to site for trusted information, is it?
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Videocardz isn't the one saying it. It's just a link where you can read it.

Why are you trying so hard to crap on it? DP already got banned for doing what you're doing.
 
Orangey said:
Videocardz isn't the one saying it. It's just a link where you can read it.

Why are you trying so hard to crap on it? DP already got banned for doing what you're doing.
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Because it's a re-brand, plain and simple, with a £100 premium (or more!) over the 290X.

Feel free to RTM me if you want. I'm not saying anything that the review sites aren't making glaringly obvious.

It's a re-brand. The clock-for-clock improvements are tiny, being due to the maturity of the 28nm process, and even with the clock bumps amount to 10% more speed only.

10% for £100 more. Sure, ban me for not being super excited about that!

Anyway, it seems like this is a joke thread. Far from being "serious discussion" of the card, all you want to do is heap praise on it and big up AMD for this "achievement". Guess you should call the thread "Glorious people's champion AMD release amazing new 390X for benefit of whole world!" Would be more obvious what kind of "discussion" you wanted here.
 
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FoxEye said:
Because it's a re-brand, plain and simple, with a £100 premium (or more!) over the 290X.

Feel free to RTM me if you want. I'm not saying anything that the review sites aren't making glaringly obvious.

It's a re-brand. The clock-for-clock improvements are tiny, being due to the maturity of the 28nm process, and even with the clock bumps amount to 10% more speed only.

10% for £100 more. Sure, ban me for not being super excited about that!
Click to expand...

It's definitely a re-brand but from judging from real world performance it seems to be doing quite well. AMD just needed it to compete with the 980 which it doesn't do at 1080p, but it definitely does at 1440p and and higher resolutions. Importantly, it seems to consume less power than the 290X and stays cooler too:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_r9_390x_gaming_8g_oc_review,1.html
 
Some of us prefer to work it out for ourselves rather than being told. :)

We have heard tell of improvements, we have a vector for our investigation and we are going to pursue it. :)

The argument over "rebrand vs refresh" doesn't interest me as much as the tech itself.
 
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