AMD Radeon R9 300 Series MegaThread: FAQ and Resources

[renz496]

Actually AMD is no longer making discrete graphics cards. You heard it here firsts. They are going into the hotdog business.

well joking aside that could be AMD intention when they first acquire ATI. just like sound card become a niche because of integrated sound getting better maybe AMD expect discrete GPU will go that way in the future. only it does not happen as fast as AMD would hope it.

 

[i7Baby]

Is it AMD or Radeon? Who does what?

 

[unknownofprob]

AMD makes Radeon, which also includes their named ATI. Radeon is a name, not a company.

 

[gamingboomchick]

I have no doubt the R9 3xx will be great performers but I won't be surprised if they're power hungry. AMD's track record in this area is quite evident. The cards will most likely big huge too. Guess AMD likes to go with "bigger is better!"

 

[cmi86]

Apparently there have been some leaks as far as code names, limited specs and alleged performance numbers on the 3XX series, not in stone but the sources have been fairly reliable in the past.

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-300-series-graphics-cards-codenames-detailed-rumors-point-grenada-hawaiis-successor/

http://wccftech.com/amd-putting-finishing-touches-r9-300-series/

http://wccftech.com/amds-radeon-r9-390x-es-performance-numbers-allegedly-leaked-faster-geforce-gtx-980-consumes-197w-gaming/

http://wccftech.com/amd-fiji-xt-r9-390x-shipping/

 

[ern88]

The R9 380 maybe a good card to replace my HD7950!!!

 

[king3pj]

The R9 380 maybe a good card to replace my HD7950!!!

I spent the last few days trying to decide between replacing my 2GB 7850 with a 280x, 290, or GTX 970. After reading this thread and some of the links in it I think I may be better off waiting for a 380 like you. If waiting a few months can get me something around 290 levels for less money that sounds like the way to go.

Another reason I'm planning on holding off is because of DirectX 12. I fully admit that I don't know anything about DirectX. I don't know if current cards like the 290 can fully take advantage of DirectX 12 through a driver update or if this has to be built into the hardware. All I know is that Nvidia claims that the 970 will fully support DirectX12 and I can't find anything saying the same about the 290. I have to assume that AMD wouldn't release the 300 series without full DirectX 12 support though.

 

[smeezekitty]

DirectX 12 will be supported on the 290 and all other GCN cards:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2014mar20.aspx

Now I don't know how complete the DX12 support will be on the current gen cards by NVidia and AMD.

 

[renz496]

DirectX 12 will be supported on the 290 and all other GCN cards:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2014mar20.aspx

Now I don't know how complete the DX12 support will be on the current gen cards by NVidia and AMD.

in general nvdia will support DX12 down to their fermi based cards. for AMD all their GCN based will be. 5k and 6k will be left out.

 

[cst1992]

http://wccftech.com/amd-fiji-xt-r9-390x-shipping/
Shipping data says the fiji PCB costs 75K, so looks like the 390x will be a $1250 card atleast.

 

[cst1992]

Also, looks like it's Cooler Master watercooling this time:
https://www.zauba.com/import-102-c88001-00-hs-code.html

 

[smeezekitty]

http://wccftech.com/amd-fiji-xt-r9-390x-shipping/
Shipping data says the fiji PCB costs 75K, so looks like the 390x will be a $1250 card atleast.

Seriously? Damn that is expensive. Might be a little less in us dollars but still

 

[cst1992]

That's not Indian price; it's shipping data. So expect the same price in US dollars.
E.g. the ASUS Strix 970 is INR 21308 which is somewhere around $345. That's indeed the price in US dollars isn't it?
I'm anticipating the price in India would be somewhere between 90-100k, if at all it comes to Indian markets.
Want to hear another shocker? The GTX Titan Z is available at a shop, and it costs INR 242,424. At current exchange rate that's $3901.57. So no surprise it's only available through pre-order.

 

[renz496]

http://wccftech.com/amd-fiji-xt-r9-390x-shipping/
Shipping data says the fiji PCB costs 75K, so looks like the 390x will be a $1250 card atleast.

Seriously? Damn that is expensive. Might be a little less in us dollars but still

no one actually knows what exact card that is. it could be a fire pro card. so far calling it as 390X is a pure speculation.

 

[11sphere92]

Uh if its gonna cost 1200$ bucks. Its not gonna get Price over performance.
Too expensive!

 

[BluePriest]

Assuming the rumors that the 390 will only be 4gb because of the HBM requirements, does that mean that the 290x 8 gb would outperform it in 4k gaming? Or will the additional bandwidth make up for it? My poor 7950 isnt liking my 4k gaming and im planning on upgrading soon.

 

[smeezekitty]

Assuming the rumors that the 390 will only be 4gb because of the HBM requirements, does that mean that the 290x 8 gb would outperform it in 4k gaming? Or will the additional bandwidth make up for it? My poor 7950 isnt liking my 4k gaming and im planning on upgrading soon.

Honestly, I think the fast GPU and high memory bandwidth will make texture swapping not that painful. Especially with PCI-E 3.0
I don't think that games go *that* far over 4 GB that it would be outright thrashing.

It's not surprising the 7950 is slow in 4K. It is only a mid-range card now. It is good for about 1920x1080 at barely high settings in new games.

 

[jmanusa6]

From what I've read the 390/390x will be 4096 stream processors, 4gb HBM-4096bit mem bus and could be competing with the GTX980ti 2560 cuda cores, 8gb gddr5, 384bit bus, 190w tdp.

The 380x should have 4096 stream processors, 4gb HBM-1024bit mem bus, 300w tdp. It is suppose to compete with the gtx980.

The 380/385 probably will be same as 380x with less stream processors with roughly a 300w tdp set to compete with the gtx970.

The 370/370x should be 3gb gddr5, 384bit bus. Competing with the GTX960.

The 360/360x should be 2gb gddr5, 256bit bus. Maybe pairing up the the GTX950.

If your not sure to snag a cheap 290/290x now or wait, I'd wait for he 300 series for the "full" dx12 support. AMD anouced the current GCN based card will support dx12 to an extent but most likely will not support dx12's full feature set. Test have already been done by anandatech with dx12 and Windows 10 beta with a 290x and 780ti with star swarm. The 290x had a 400% performance increase while the 780ti had a 165% performance increase. Neither of these cards fully support dx12 and are still showing big performance gains, so the new cards that do should be even better. Just gotta wait till next year when some dx12 games start showing up.

I also heard on tek syndicate show that dx12 will allow the use of AMD and Nvidia cards in the same machine working together. Also may allow the use of two card that aren't the same.... Say a 380x and 360x in crossfire.... We'll see I guess.

 

[-Fran-]

Anyone has seen any FLOPs numbers for the 390X? I think I saw 8.x TFLOPs for SP. That will put it ahead of the TITAN X, but I don't know how that will translate to games, really.

Cheers!

 

[renz496]

Anyone has seen any FLOPs numbers for the 390X? I think I saw 8.x TFLOPs for SP. That will put it ahead of the TITAN X, but I don't know how that will translate to games, really.

Cheers!

that numbers will look nice to HPC crowd. but will it matter much in games? GTX780Ti have 5.04TFlops. GTX980 have 4.6TFlops. in games 980 still faster.

 

[cst1992]

8,192.
Theoretical benchmarks aren't a good indication, anyway. AMD's architecture is integer based, whereas NVIDIA's is floating point.
Theoretically, the 390x would be 1.33x faster, though I doubt it. On some of the cards I've seen of AMD, this value has been a bit higher for the same performance.

 

[de5_Roy]

AMD Fiji has two GPUs
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37373-amd-fiji-has-two-gpus

So, when Fudzilla wrote that Fiji is going to ship with 8GB of RAM, we didn’t actually think that we were talking about two separate GPUs, on separate interposers, with each GPU using 4GB of HBM1 memory. This is how AMD got to 8GB, or should we say two times 4GB for this card. It makes much more sense now, and of course we would not be surprised to see Fiji for notebooks and lower-end desktop products in a single GPU configuration.

 

[-Fran-]

Well, if Fiji turns out being a dual GPU config will really bummer me, but I guess it's not that bad if they put extra effort in making it work seamlessly... I really hope they get a decent single GPU out of it in any case.

Cheers!

 

[de5_Roy]

Well, if Fiji turns out being a dual GPU config will really bummer me, but I guess it's not that bad if they put extra effort in making it work seamlessly... I really hope they get a decent single GPU out of it in any case.

Cheers!

IIRC fiji was supposed to be a dual gpu card, then the subsequent batch of rumors suggested that fiji will be single gpu, the next batch chaned litho from 20nm to 28nm and so on. fiji being dual gpu makes a lot of logical sense if you consider the other aspects of the gfx card - dual gpu means vram is counted together and we know that 4GB is the current spec (per gpu). the a.i.o. hybrid l.c.s. also makes sense since the gpu(s) will be 28nm. 2.5D package config will be highly beneficial for dual gpu cards for reducing physical footprints, layering etc. the pcie power inputs and card tdp also make more sense.

now the stuff that don't make sense to me. the first one is the radeon core count 4096 - how is it measured? each gpu has 2048 and armed with HBM or is it 8192 cores? we know that the cooling subsystem will cost around $100-150, two high end gpus (read gfx cards) will be uh.. $350-400 apiece...? so 8GB HBM comes to $150-250? this would make building cheaper single gpu or cutdown versions much easier yet we'll be flooded with rebrands.

all of these with plenty of Native Client.

 

[-Fran-]

Yeah... Superficially, the information seems to make more sense for a dual GPU single slot card. Specially the need for liquid cooling, unless those were "special" cards or something (they were in display, so...).

And the Stream count is aggregated per GPU, usually; that means 2x2048 if it's a dual GPU card.

Now, on the other hand, they said "8GB" after saying 4GB was not enough (where the biggest indicator came from), so there might be Fiji and Fiji X2 at launch.

Cheers!