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Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199

Rroff said:
At 1440p I'm pushing the boundaries of 3GB VRAM and doesn't take much to hit 4GB - even at 1080p I wouldn't be buying anything with 4GB or less if I was buying a new card now for serious gaming.
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My question to you is how can you tell? You can't just look at memory usage figures for your card - that can be full with no effect on performance because what's filling it up is just uncleared cached data which isn't actually needed. You don't clear out old cache until you need to as a rule because it gains you nothing and adds risk that you were wrong about not needing it. So a full memory tells you nothing. Unless you actually do comparison runs with and without a given amount of memory, you can't tell.
 
Guru3d

Performance wise you just cannot be anything other than thrilled about the Radeon RX 480. Now, the card is a bit all over the place; extremely fast in fill-rate limited games, a little less with GPU stringent ones but overall you are looking at a product that competes with the GeForce GTX 970 and sometimes even 980. What was baffling to see though is that this 8GB model is often spot on in performance with the Radeon R9 390 series and thus R9 290 series as well. And that actually might be a problem. See, many of you are already in the 390 or Fury series and seen from that product perspective, the RX 480 will offer nothing new other than a few features. However, as we rewind that to where you are on a 280/280X/280 series graphics card, well, for 199 or 229 USD you are in for a treat in terms of performance and value. Let's not forget about other features; the Radeon RX 480 and Polaris 10 overall will offer proper performance, Eyefinity features and PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all the other stuff like HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.4 with HDR support and so on. The Radeon RX 480 series is a proper DirectX 12 product right from the get-go and has that little extra bite thanks to an increased number of shader processors (2304).
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Gerard said:
Maybe so but that's always the war cry, performance will improve. Invariably it does but at the same time you'd think they would want to put their best foot forwards with drivers to give the card the best possible showing on its release. Release day reviews make or break the card, so they should have polished drivers for it then and not try to make a song and dance about increased performance 6 months down the line when nobody cares anymore.
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Yea, performance through driver improvements is something I treat as a bonus, not a way for me to judge the value of a card thinking, "Well it's not as good as I'd like now, but maybe in 6-12 months!". I want expected performance throughout the life of the card, not just after a certain period of time.
 
Gerard said:
Well the only version today apparently is the reference board so that's what will be judged in terms of thermals and overclocking. If third party boards can do better i'm surprised amd never made a push for them to be out at the same time as the reference card.
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The 290x ran pretty loud at stock on the reference card. The temperature alone is not what made 290x seem hot, it's that it ran at 95c stock, throttled and had a high fan noise to achieve that.

If this card runs 83C with a very quiet or silent fan then it's not running hot. If you take any card ever made and turn the fan down further the heat goes up. Temps that don't kill the card and lowest fan noise possible are the general design goals of a gpu cooler. Making a card run at 65C with an ear splitting fan gains the 99% of users who don't overclock and want quiet nothing, where as 80C and silent or close to it is preferred by almost every user.
 
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