RX 490 Speculation

Troezar · 3 Dec 2016 at 09:19

Surprised we haven't had more talk on here about this card. Admittedly there aren't a lot of hard facts but what do you think it will be?

Is this just a stop gap before the full Vega cards are released or some oddity like a dual chip RX480?

If Vega is any good I may consider selling my 1070 and giving it a go. I do like the 1070, cool, quiet and fast but I think I'm an AMD man at heart. I like an underdog!

Rroff · 3 Dec 2016 at 09:21

Been some talk about it in the Vega thread but a lot of the information about it appears highly likely to be fake so far.

Troezar · 3 Dec 2016 at 09:41

Rroff said:
Been some talk about it in the Vega thread but a lot of the information about it appears highly likely to be fake so far.

Did I see December 13th as an announcement date or is that just for Zen? Maybe there will be some RX490 info then.

AMD really need some cards to rival Nvidia, that was the main reason I bought a 1070, my first Nvidia card. I do also like the way Nvidia deliver their drivers, a more slick process than AMDs imo.

Griffildur · 3 Dec 2016 at 09:45

I thought this card was supposed to be released at some point this month, I cannot, for the life of me remember where I saw this though ...

Rroff · 3 Dec 2016 at 10:06

Griffildur said:
I thought this card was supposed to be released at some point this month, I cannot, for the life of me remember where I saw this though ...

Supposedly a reveal not release but even that is mostly speculation due to Zen and a few hints from AMD.

africanos23 · 3 Dec 2016 at 10:58

Rumours have it that its hotter than hell and you need to run a plug straight from a three phase circuit board with load balancer

Panos · 3 Dec 2016 at 11:29

Troezar said:
Surprised we haven't had more talk on here about this card. Admittedly there aren't a lot of hard facts but what do you think it will be?

Is this just a stop gap before the full Vega cards are released or some oddity like a dual chip RX480?

If Vega is any good I may consider selling my 1070 and giving it a go. I do like the 1070, cool, quiet and fast but I think I'm an AMD man at heart. I like an underdog!

What Vega? RX490 if EVER goes for sale, it will be a dual Polaris chip (2x 480s)

Vega is Series 5xx, and comes out H1 2017 (possibly June).

Dec 13th, is the Zen event.

Troezar · 3 Dec 2016 at 13:11

Panos said:
What Vega? RX490 if EVER goes for sale, it will be a dual Polaris chip (2x 480s)

Vega is Series 5xx, and comes out H1 2017 (possibly June).

Dec 13th, is the Zen event.

Yes hence there reference to "stop gap" and thoughts about when Vega does arrive, I think you've conflated the two thoughts. Whatever RX 490 is it won't be with an upgrade from a GTX 1070. However full fat Vega could well be if it gives the 1080Ti a run for its money.

Nasher · 3 Dec 2016 at 13:35

I suspect AMD are cutting down on the amount of models they make at a time to reduce costs, theres no "X" models either this time. I think it will either be at the end of this generation or the start of the next. Maybe it will become a 580.

The 480 is a pretty good card for the money and seems to be selling ok. A 490 probably wouldn't beat a 1080, so maybe they don't want to risk it.

orbitalwalsh · 3 Dec 2016 at 15:55

Single chip from Game bench mark....

Just under a 1080...

videocardz.com/64475/are-those-radeon-rx-490-vega10-benchmarks-results

D1craig · 3 Dec 2016 at 16:27

what happened to drivers? when i got my first proper gaming pc i updated my driver less than every 3 months and everything was fine. why now do we need them everytime a game is released?

rtho782 · 3 Dec 2016 at 18:13

If this is a dual gpu card it's a bit of a joke.

Quite apart from anything else, giving away two 232mm2 GPUs and double the RAM is a recipe for them to lose money as nVidia have the option of dropping the price of the 1070 (314mm2) below AMD's profitability.

SLI and Crossfire are on life support anyway at this point, so most of the time you'll get far lower performance.

Griffildur · 4 Dec 2016 at 09:18

D1craig said:
what happened to drivers? when i got my first proper gaming pc i updated my driver less than every 3 months and everything was fine. why now do we need them everytime a game is released?

That's a very good question. Game specific drivers does feel absolutely ridiculous.

Panos · 4 Dec 2016 at 09:49

D1craig said:
what happened to drivers? when i got my first proper gaming pc i updated my driver less than every 3 months and everything was fine. why now do we need them everytime a game is released?

If AMD doesn't produce drivers every time a game is produced, then some going to cry "no optimised drivers you suck AMD", "no CF you suck AMD" and the list goes on. Right now at least they keep up with the rate NV produces new drivers.

Which I must say are pants (the NV drivers). They had to release 4 drivers in 5 days to fix an issue with the gif files! Let alone the 144hz bug, that took them 7 months to fix, and many many other issues I had, with brand new 1080.....

Griffildur · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:01

Panos said:
If AMD doesn't produce drivers every time a game is produced, then some going to cry "no optimised drivers you suck AMD", "no CF you suck AMD" and the list goes on. Right now at least they keep up with the rate NV produces new drivers.

Which I must say are pants (the NV drivers). They had to release 4 drivers in 5 days to fix an issue with the gif files! Let alone the 144hz bug, that took them 7 months to fix, and many many other issues I had, with brand new 1080.....

what 144 hz bug?

r7slayer · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:21

Panos said:
What Vega? RX490 if EVER goes for sale, it will be a dual Polaris chip (2x 480s)

Vega is Series 5xx, and comes out H1 2017 (possibly June).

Dec 13th, is the Zen event.

I just can't see it. Releasing a dual polaris GPU with 8Gb of GDDR5 memory means 4Gb per GPU and with Vega on the horizon why bother with a xfire card when you can get a better single card solution for probably about the same price or slightly more for more performance and more memory.

AMD only ever release a dual GPU card to be the most powerful single card solution however with the way things have turned out with Polaris only ever targeting Mid range users and nothing for enthusiasts and Vega now on the horizon what possibly would be the point of a Polaris dual GPU card financially to AMD? Yes they released a dual chip card quite a few gens back which was not to full fat chips but Vega is right on the door it makes no plausible sense.

490 will need to be a single GPU solution other wise what's the point it just wont fit anywhere or sell that well.

nashathedog · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:33

r7slayer said:
Yes they released a dual chip card quite a few gens back which was not to full fat chips but Vega is right on the door it makes no plausible sense.

What was that? The 295 was two 290x's and I thought the 7970 was two 7970's as well. The only non full chip card I can think of was Powercolor's dual 390 card which was their build not AMD's.

Panos · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:44

Griffildur said:
what 144 hz bug?

Basically many 144hz monitors owners, we had to either lower our refresh rate to 120hz, or some lucky just to keep their monitor off when the PC was rebooting and until after it loaded into windows; or else while on desktop we faced artefacts and very bad flickering like you plug - unplug the power forming electric charges on the screen

A visit at the official forums you will see the extend of the problem and how many are raging there over the last 7 months. It only affects 1080s, and has to do with the default clock speeds on desktop.

Rroff · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:47

Griffildur said:
what 144 hz bug?

Some people have been plagued by either flickering on the desktop at 144Hz or the GPU running flat out at idle when at 144Hz. Don't understand it myself as I've multiple high res/high refresh rate setups and never been affected by it.

Despite nVidia chasing it down as a driver issue (which it might well be) the only instances of it I've encountered so far were due to malware in one case and a system monitoring widget in the other - there are people in the driver thread here claiming problems with a fresh install however.

Panos · 4 Dec 2016 at 10:50

Rroff said:
Some people have been plagued by either flickering on the desktop at 144Hz or the GPU running flat out at idle when at 144Hz. Don't understand it myself as I've multiple high res/high refresh rate setups and never been affected by it.

Despite nVidia chasing it down as a driver issue (which it might well be) the only instances of it I've encountered so far were due to malware in one case and a system monitoring widget in the other - there are people in the driver thread here claiming problems with a fresh install however.

Yep, it plagued me from the first day I bought the 1080 to the last day I sold it (last friday)