AMD Radeon R9 300 Series MegaThread: FAQ and Resources

[Vogner16]

MM forget it being a rebrand. its a gpu for a $ amount. does it perform as it should for its cost? yes.

You claim to have a 270x for F@H and now you have a 380 as well but only seem to bash the products. why keep buying them? I haven't gotten a gpu since my 7870CF and recently a used 7970. simply because I found the perf to cost to be great. I don't care if the box was dusty and said old gpu on it (got it from an ebayer who didn't even include the box). I know the 7970 came out 4 years ago. Its still faster than a 960 and I paid $130 for it. Done. Rebrand or not it does not matter. Instead of buying that 380 you perhaps should have gotten a 7950 on ebay for $100 if you didn't think the updated cooler and driver support was worth the extra cost.

the 380 does have more features than the 7950, and is faster. mostly due to faster ram.

When did I ever claim that? Please post proof. And I can buy whatever I want thank you very much and I don't have to justify my purchases to you or anyone else.

im sorry I misread. you said something about 380x and you had a 380 and I thought you said something about a 270x for F@H and that was for the 380.

 

[Mousemonkey]

MM forget it being a rebrand. its a gpu for a $ amount. does it perform as it should for its cost? yes.

You claim to have a 270x for F@H and now you have a 380 as well but only seem to bash the products. why keep buying them? I haven't gotten a gpu since my 7870CF and recently a used 7970. simply because I found the perf to cost to be great. I don't care if the box was dusty and said old gpu on it (got it from an ebayer who didn't even include the box). I know the 7970 came out 4 years ago. Its still faster than a 960 and I paid $130 for it. Done. Rebrand or not it does not matter. Instead of buying that 380 you perhaps should have gotten a 7950 on ebay for $100 if you didn't think the updated cooler and driver support was worth the extra cost.

the 380 does have more features than the 7950, and is faster. mostly due to faster ram.

When did I ever claim that? Please post proof. And I can buy whatever I want thank you very much and I don't have to justify my purchases to you or anyone else.

im sorry I misread. you said something about 380x and you had a 380 and I thought you said something about a 270x for F@H and that was for the 380.

Apology accepted, I do have a 7790 though as well as the 380 and both were purchased for testing and F@H.

 

[17seconds]

No mentions on here about the new Crimson Software suite and the fact that AMD has dropped driver support for all non-GCN products.
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-drops-support-for-non-gcn-based-graphics-cards.html

 

[Vogner16]

I saw it cant say im surprised, but I do guess that affects the trinity apu's which are fairly new.

 

[Mousemonkey]

No mentions on here about the new Crimson Software suite and the fact that AMD has dropped driver support for all non-GCN products.
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-drops-support-for-non-gcn-based-graphics-cards.html

I would have got to that eventually! :lol:

 

[cdrkf]

No mentions on here about the new Crimson Software suite and the fact that AMD has dropped driver support for all non-GCN products.
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-drops-support-for-non-gcn-based-graphics-cards.html

The crimzon software looks good.

Also a small update on the fate of pre GCN products- the new Crimzon drivers *do support* HD5000 and HD6000 VILW based cards, *however* this is the last driver that will support those. Future updates will be GCN only.

Thing is though, I doubt there's much optomisation left to be had from the older VILW based cards, and the fact they have included them in this driver means they get access to quite a few of the new features that don't require explicit hardware changes. I don't see this is any worse than nVidia who only support as far back as Fermi (which isn't as old as HD5000 I'd point out).

 

[fudgecakes99]

Look at all the salty people? Where do they all come from? Can we all agree, that amd's playing the value game for now?

 

[cdrkf]

Look at all the salty people? Where do they all come from? Can we all agree, that amd's playing the value game for now?

I'd say that is underselling them.

The attitude here comes across as 'AMD playing catch up' but it isn't as clear cut as that imo. Yes nVidia has an efficiency advantage (note however that if you look at Fiji vs GM200, both companies latest designs, the advantage is small), however irrespective both firms have similar sized die's (max available for 28nm process) with similar numbers of transistors and shock horror similar performance. It's lower down the product stack that NV have managed to gain an upper hand (although there is an argunemt to sugest that some of the power savings have come at the cost of longevity- async compute and substandard memory bandwidth anyone?).

Strikes me that overall they are pretty level. The new software updates look good too, AMD look set to continue to keep consoles sewn up and I think it's very much all to play for next gen 😛

 

[Vogner16]

crimson is good. just some light testing resulted in 3 fps average faster in starwars battlefront for me with my 7970.

It is really as fast as they say. click it, pop its open. overclocking setup is better and specialized toward each game/ all if you want to make it that way.

I also ran 3dmark 11 with lowered clocks than my previous best score and got a higher score than my all time best.

It really is a good driver update and from what I read on wccftech it gives a huge fps gain to hbm cards.

 

[con635]

nvidia need to catch up with drivers now, the last 8 months have been terrible on team green, hard crashes on win10 with certain video softwares for god knows how long, every 4-5 times I switch my pc on I'm greeted with no desktop just c64 style flashing colours and now amd have this cool new sw, I know what I'll be asking santa for now.

 

[renz496]

nvidia need to catch up with drivers now, the last 8 months have been terrible on team green, hard crashes on win10 with certain video softwares for god knows how long, every 4-5 times I switch my pc on I'm greeted with no desktop just c64 style flashing colours and now amd have this cool new sw, I know what I'll be asking santa for now.

been using nvidia driver for so long. so far everything working fine for me.

 

[Vogner16]

nvidia need to catch up with drivers now, the last 8 months have been terrible on team green, hard crashes on win10 with certain video softwares for god knows how long, every 4-5 times I switch my pc on I'm greeted with no desktop just c64 style flashing colours and now amd have this cool new sw, I know what I'll be asking santa for now.

been using nvidia driver for so long. so far everything working fine for me.

my buddy has a 980M win 10 alienware and has had the worst lighting errors and random driver crashes as well.

best you can get for a laptop, but drivers really mess it up. battlefront is the worst so far. tatooine has these weird reverse shadows going on and (not that any gpu plays it) the new batman has constant frame stutters and texture corruptions for distant areas. drivers need a lot of work for team green.

 

[Mousemonkey]

nvidia need to catch up with drivers now, the last 8 months have been terrible on team green, hard crashes on win10 with certain video softwares for god knows how long, every 4-5 times I switch my pc on I'm greeted with no desktop just c64 style flashing colours and now amd have this cool new sw, I know what I'll be asking santa for now.

been using nvidia driver for so long. so far everything working fine for me.

my buddy has a 980M win 10 alienware and has had the worst lighting errors and random driver crashes as well.

best you can get for a laptop, but drivers really mess it up. battlefront is the worst so far. tatooine has these weird reverse shadows going on and (not that any gpu plays it) the new batman has constant frame stutters and texture corruptions for distant areas. drivers need a lot of work for team green.

Nvida's drivers have been fine for me but then I'm sticking with W7 64 for the time being as W10 has no appeal for the moment.

 

[renz496]

So does AMD cards work great with batman arkham knight? I thought it was more of game issue and not driver issue. And just because few people have problems in the game you can assume ALL nvidia user have problems.

 

[Vogner16]

So does AMD cards work great with batman arkham knight? I thought it was more of game issue and not driver issue. And just because few people have problems in the game you can assume ALL nvidia user have problems.

please read the entire comment before attacking. I said "(not that any gpu plays it)".

I have issues with my amd card he has issues with his NVidia card. mearly pointing out that no drivers are better than the other company's.

I think that AMD's drivers have been improving vastly since I started getting amd gpu's with the launch of the 6000 series. To the point where they have gotten as good as nvidias drivers and with the release of crimson finally better even. amd cards work great even on NVidia games at equal to slightly slower performance than the cards designed to run the code of the game (im talking about gameworks). do some digging into performance gains by driver updates and you will see amd cards make greater gains over time for most cards while NVidia cards stop improving after 2 years and then even show slight losses in new drivers. this constant upgrading of performance may be due to "rebrands" but I see it as free power.

While both companies have driver issues, amd's issues seem to be getting less while nvidias problems are getting larger.

Gameworks seems to only gimp games ACU, batman, watchdogs, basicly every new game with gameworks has horrible settings that destroy framerates on all computers. drivers fix them but then we still have random crashes and tessellation errors. then after 5 patches and 3 months off the steam store the re-release the game to it still sucking. NVidia has gotten lazy with their market control. Even leaving amd with a tiny 20% and NVidia does this? im scared to think what would happen if amd did go out of business. say goodbye to any drivers working and say hello to titans for everyone!

 

[Mousemonkey]

So does AMD cards work great with batman arkham knight? I thought it was more of game issue and not driver issue. And just because few people have problems in the game you can assume ALL nvidia user have problems.

please read the entire comment before attacking. I said "(not that any gpu plays it)".

I have issues with my amd card he has issues with his NVidia card. mearly pointing out that no drivers are better than the other company's.

I think that AMD's drivers have been improving vastly since I started getting amd gpu's with the launch of the 6000 series. To the point where they have gotten as good as nvidias drivers and with the release of crimson finally better even. amd cards work great even on NVidia games at equal to slightly slower performance than the cards designed to run the code of the game (im talking about gameworks). do some digging into performance gains by driver updates and you will see amd cards make greater gains over time for most cards while NVidia cards stop improving after 2 years and then even show slight losses in new drivers. this constant upgrading of performance may be due to "rebrands" but I see it as free power.

While both companies have driver issues, amd's issues seem to be getting less while nvidias problems are getting larger.

Gameworks seems to only gimp games ACU, batman, watchdogs, basicly every new game with gameworks has horrible settings that destroy framerates on all computers. drivers fix them but then we still have random crashes and tessellation errors. then after 5 patches and 3 months off the steam store the re-release the game to it still sucking. NVidia has gotten lazy with their market control. Even leaving amd with a tiny 20% and NVidia does this? im scared to think what would happen if amd did go out of business. say goodbye to any drivers working and say hello to titans for everyone!

Maybe Nvidia are holding back just to give AMD a chance? Perhaps they feel that if they really went for it they would be kicking a puppy in the face! :lol:

 

[-Fran-]

MM, I don't intend to change your way of thinking, but it would be nice to read your intelligent remarks in some constructive way instead.

And in other news!

http://techreport.com/news/29369/club-3d-active-adapters-convert-displayport-1-2-to-hdmi-2-0

It was bound to happen. Nano is now viable as an HTPC powerhouse! Well, until they are widely available, that is.

So... Who has been able to even spot one? I know I haven't, lol.

Cheers! 😛

 

[Bossyfins]

That is one reason the new furys may not have been so successful. It is so scarce. At time I think if it was a stab in the back to release a product and have limited quanities.

 

[renz496]

Yes it is nice to see those performance improvement on those radeons but that only point to one thing actually: if AMD put more such effort since the beginning then user did not have to wait for two years to gain such performance.

People complaining using game works setting will impact the performance...what? You were using much more demanding graphical setting and you expect zero performance impact from that?

And of course you were going to heard more issues on nvidia side because there were actually more user using nvidia cards then using AMD cards.

 

[jerdle]

Maybe if game works didn't come from a heritage of things like tessellating the bottom of ocean floors that nobody would ever see, those performance impacts wouldn't be as noticeable.

 

[renz496]

And did you know what the most funny about that? Without nvidia 2 million 'donation' to crytek the game will not even going to see DX11 nor HD texture pack being patch in into the game.

What nvidia did with crysis 2 was excessive but still doesn't change the fact better graphic also going to eat your performance. PC gamer only have one problem. When the game easily max out they will blame dev for not properly utilize all the raw power available on pc and asking for more. But when dev making demanding games they will accuse developer being lazy to properly optimize their games so it can run well. In Batman AK the problem is not game works. Even without those the PC version still work like garbage. Sometimes i think that probably Rocksteady/WB way of giving middle finger to PC gamer for being so hard to please.

 

[deuce_23]

I have always been an AMD fan boy one of my first cards a 2900xt worked well then i got a HD 4870x2 which i loved. I had the HD 4870x2 for a long time and i paid about $650 and got it 2 days before the official release date. I could have kept that card longer as it ran all my games just fine. I upgraded to the Hd 7950 and that has run all my games just fine. I started to get pissy when i start to read articles about AMD re-branding the HD 7xxx to the r9xxx then to the r93xx. it just seem wrong but from a marketing point i get it. I was not happy when AMD claimed HBM will be the game changer. I new something was wrong when they would not release bench marks. I think its just the way AMD has handled them selves. I just got a gtx 980ti because im keen for vr. My alienware runs a gtx 970m and is great. I have heard that AMD cards run hot which can reduce the life of the card compared to Nvida which seem to run a lot cooler. Who knows?

 

[turkey3_scratch]

And did you know what the most funny about that? Without nvidia 2 million 'donation' to crytek the game will not even going to see DX11 nor HD texture pack being patch in into the game.

What nvidia did with crysis 2 was excessive but still doesn't change the fact better graphic also going to eat your performance. PC gamer only have one problem. When the game easily max out they will blame dev for not properly utilize all the raw power available on pc and asking for more. But when dev making demanding games they will accuse developer being lazy to properly optimize their games so it can run well. In Batman AK the problem is not game works. Even without those the PC version still work like garbage. Sometimes i think that probably Rocksteady/WB way of giving middle finger to PC gamer for being so hard to please.

This is exactly what I am saying about AC Syndicate. It actually seems like a well-made AC game graphic wise from the get-go, and people can play well on medium and even high, but there are still a lot saying it's "unoptimized". I thin they just don't realize that it is a graphic intense game, and that because the graphics are nicer running on ultra will be a lot harder than running other games on ultra.

 

[nikoli707]

having seen the way these developers run their shops.... too liberal, entitled, lazy, hot tub, nap breaks, showers, dart boards, pool tables, etc... im not at all surprised about how many games run on pc(or even consoles now). there is no doubt its flat out lazy optimization efforts. the problem is management allowing these very tall children to code.

 

[con635]

And did you know what the most funny about that? Without nvidia 2 million 'donation' to crytek the game will not even going to see DX11 nor HD texture pack being patch in into the game.

What nvidia did with crysis 2 was excessive but still doesn't change the fact better graphic also going to eat your performance. PC gamer only have one problem. When the game easily max out they will blame dev for not properly utilize all the raw power available on pc and asking for more. But when dev making demanding games they will accuse developer being lazy to properly optimize their games so it can run well. In Batman AK the problem is not game works. Even without those the PC version still work like garbage. Sometimes i think that probably Rocksteady/WB way of giving middle finger to PC gamer for being so hard to please.

But under map oceans, ultra godrays and 64x tess in hw doesn't make the graphics any better, its akin to starting up a game, alt tabbing and running a stress test just so your pc is at 100% load. People complain when the iq doesn't warrant the low frame rate on mid/high end hw.