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Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199

Seanspeed said:
Last I checked, no.
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They largely are. Pascal is mostly Maxwell in a smaller font-size. Obviously there are differences but compared to the re-architecture everyone thinks Polaris is vs. its own previous gen, Maxwell and Pascal are pretty much the same thing, except you can clock them higher because of the smaller process. A few bells and whistles grafted on.
 
h4rm0ny said:
I always got the impression that the reason Nvidia cards "degrade" is because Nvidia puts lots of optimizations in for new games as they come out and that shows up in the benchmarks - i.e. some of the performance you see in comparisons is Nvidia's close relationship with the game studios. But they only do that for current cards. So the accurate way to look at it is that Nvidia cards get a boost when they're the latest ones out, but that boost doesn't apply to older cards. Thus creating the illusion that they degrade in performance as time goes on. Whereas AMD are what they are without benefiting from some boost due to optimizations. So in practical terms, AMD cards improve in relative performance vs. Nvidia cards with age.

Think of it as Nvidia's software team running behind their latest cards giving them a little push. But when the new cards come out, they run behind that one and forget about the old.
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If you look back to the Kepler launch article,AT mentioned Nvidia moved to software scheduling with Kepler,so it does seem Nvidia probably has to spend more time on optimising things on their side. Hence,when the newer cards come out,it appears the older cards get slower but is more the case,they are concentrating on the newer cards as the older ones are moved to second rung status. With AMD,we might be seeing older cards looking relatively better,but they moved to integrating more things in hardware,but it came with penalties in areas like power consumption.
 
h4rm0ny said:
I always got the impression that the reason Nvidia cards "degrade" is because Nvidia puts lots of optimizations in for new games as they come out and that shows up in the benchmarks - i.e. some of the performance you see in comparisons is Nvidia's close relationship with the game studios. But they only do that for current cards. So the accurate way to look at it is that Nvidia cards get a boost when they're the latest ones out, but that boost doesn't apply to older cards. Thus creating the illusion that they degrade in performance as time goes on. Whereas AMD are what they are without benefiting from some boost due to optimizations. So in practical terms, AMD cards improve in relative performance vs. Nvidia cards with age.

Think of it as Nvidia's software team running behind their latest cards giving them a little push. But when the new cards come out, they run behind that one and forget about the old.
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About right, yea. I think they come out-the-gate with more mature drivers, polish them up for about a year or two, but then move on when new cards come out because continuing to work on older cards would result in fairly negligible gains for the work required.

h4rm0ny said:
They largely are. Pascal is mostly Maxwell in a smaller font-size. Obviously there are differences but compared to the re-architecture everyone thinks Polaris is vs. its own previous gen, Maxwell and Pascal are pretty much the same thing, except you can clock them higher because of the smaller process. A few bells and whistles grafted on.
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Architecturally similar at their core, but that doesn't make them 'the same', especially when it comes to driver optimizations. Different GPU groups within the same architecture often receive specific instruction optimizations.
 
Seanspeed said:
Architecturally similar at their core, but that doesn't make them 'the same', especially when it comes to driver optimizations. Different GPU groups within the same architecture often receive specific instruction optimizations.
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Indeed - Pascal has fair amount of rejigging of the memory sub-system (especially in regards to inter-thread communication), tweaks to instruction scheduling in various areas including the stuff like pre-emption and so on.
 
Yay lets get deep into Nvidia discussions in the Polaris thread.... Again....... :(

Come on guys, try and keep it on topic, we need more info on Gibbos Golden Throne of AMD cards, i bet his rear end will remain warm sat on them ;)
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
If you look back to the Kepler launch article,AT mentioned Nvidia moved to software scheduling with Kepler,so it does seem Nvidia probably has to spend more time on optimising things on their side. Hence,when the newer cards come out,it appears the older cards get slower but is more the case,they are concentrating on the newer cards as the older ones are moved to second rung status. With AMD,we might be seeing older cards looking relatively better,but they moved to integrating more things in hardware,but it came with penalties in areas like power consumption.
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That sounds like a very good explanation. It's what I was trying to say though you probably gave the better explanation. It's not that older cards get worse (how could they) but that Nvidia work a little more on the software side of things so when that focus moves onto the latest and greatest, it's noticeable. Whereas AMD do more in the hardware side of things and obviously the hardware you've already bought isn't going to change.

Note, this isn't especially a knock on Nvidia. I've never thought the difference that significant. And many people have a two-year upgrade cycle anyway.

Seanspeed said:
Architecturally similar at their core, but that doesn't make them 'the same', especially when it comes to driver optimizations. Different GPU groups within the same architecture often receive specific instruction optimizations.
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Fair enough. It really is going to come down to what level of abstraction one chooses to take. GPUs are very complex things so of course there are many differences between Pascal and Maxwell. On the other hand, I don't think there are any particularly drastic changes if you 'zoom out' a little. That's why I threw in the comparison with Polaris to create a kind of calibration of what to consider differences or not. From what we know of Polaris, it's very significantly different to its predecessors, hence my saying Pascal is basically a shrunk down Maxwell. Though I'd probably need DrunkenMaster to intervene at this point to get into the nitty-gritty of comparisons as I'm going off a very general reading. I'll graciously agree to differ on the matter if you feel the differences are significant enough to consider them dissimilar.
 
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SiDeards73 said:
Yay lets get deep into Nvidia discussions in the Polaris thread.... Again....... :(

Come on guys, try and keep it on topic, we need more info on Gibbos Golden Throne of AMD cards, i bet his rear end will remain warm sat on them ;)
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Sorry - my bad.

If my 480 arrives in a slightly squished box I shall now know why. :)
 
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:D
 
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