Amd 480x worth the upgrade?

[hillelslovak]

I have an XFX Dual Dissipation R9 380x 4gb card.

I bought this card just two months ago, and I feel double stupid for just not waiting for the 480x. In your opinion, will I see much of an improvement in games with this card, enough to justify the extra 50-75 dollars to upgrade? My cpu is only an fx6200 and is my bottleneck, but I'm looking to get some model of i5 in the next 4 to 5 months anyway. so with my current cpu and gpu, will upgrading to the 480x be worth it?

 

[hang-the-9]

For your CPU now, not worth it. Unless you can exchange the card for no cost, I would not waste money by selling the card used and then buying the new card.

 

[17seconds]

The 480 should be less than a 10% performance increase over a 380x, according to my Computex-based calculations. We won't know for sure until reviews are released on June 29th.

 

[hillelslovak]

The 480 should be less than a 10% performance increase over a 380x, according to my Computex-based calculations. We won't know for sure until reviews are released on June 29th.

Whoah, really?

 

[azzazel_99]

what were you expecting?

 

[17seconds]

At Computex they indicated that two 480s would roughly equal a single GTX 1080... on a very pro-AMD game (Ashes of the Singularity). So all you have to do is look at this chart at the cards within the 50%+ range to match it's performance level in Ashes of the Singularity. Then look more in the 40%+ range for more neutral game performance.

That puts the 480 somewhere between a GTX 780 and 290. The 380x comes in at about the same level as the 280x. Therefore, with my rough calculation, the 480 should be just a few percent more than a 380x... for about the same price.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080/26.html

 

[bluejayek]

17seconds:

I don't think your discussion works out to the 10% increase you quote.

1) Cards don't scale perfectly in crossfire, so dividing the crossfire performance by two doesn't give you the original cards performance. This example of benchmarks I could pull up:

https://elchapuzasinformatico.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/AMD-Radeon-R9-380-CrossFire-Alien-Isolation-4K.jpg

shows that the R9 380 in crossfire is only about 65% faster than a single 380. Using that scaling on your numbers of two 480s = 1 GTX puts a single 480 at 60% on that relative performance chart. This would be a 45% jump in performance compared to the 280x on said chart.

2) Just directly based on your numbers: 40% to 50% on that chart is a jump of 25%, not 10%.

Actual performance jump is probably somewhere between these two, and we won't know until real reviews come up, but I would not be surprised to see it coming in at 30-40% performance bump over the 280.

That being said, OP: Never upgrade hardware by a single teir unless you are just made of money. There is really no reason to upgrade more then every 3 years or longer.

Unless you have a game NOW that is unplayable with the hardware you have, or see one coming in the immediate future, why spend the money? Better hardware will be here next year for cheaper if something does come out that you don't yet know about.

 

[Epicness937]

the only reason for a 480 over a 380 is if it comes with 8gb vram for.....reasons......and you need that ram for 4k or 3d rendering however that seems pointless unless you can overclock that cpu on nitrogen to 8ghz

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Actually, the 480 @ $199US will come with 4GB while the 480 @ $229 will have 8GB.

The point of the RX480 is not it's raw performance, although it will be just shy of a 290 (2304 shaders => 36 CUs @ 64 SPs each, if AMD hasn't changed their formula), the point is that it will be doing that using around 100 watts or less, giving good enough performance for the masses, and in the price range that most gaming cards are selling at. NVIDIA is going to have a hard time countering with anything they have anytime soon.

The performance improvement over the 380x will be there, but only the OP can decide if it's going to be enough to justify the cost and hassle of the upgrade. The power savings are certainly there, but I don't think too many people are really staring at the electric meter while gaming, or breaking the bank with their current equipment.

It's very likely AMD has a 490 under wraps, which would be the dual 6-pin variant, akin to the 7870, 6870, etc., that they've had as a bigger brother to the single 6-pin card they always have. Time will tell, but that would be the best candidate for an upgrade to a 380x, if you're interested in AMD and not hoping to get their top tiered card. The 490 should come in around $299 and be a good candidate to challenge the 1070.

It looks like AMD is in a position to give us more for less, this round.