AMD Radeon R9 300 Series MegaThread: FAQ and Resources

[Vogner16]

being an early adopter always has its drawbacks.

first will be expense second will be poor optimization. 4k is the future however. as gpu's get faster even consoles will start doing 4K video and then 4K games (upscaled)

the fact you don't see a difference in games is just a sign you don't have that great of eyes or the screen has a dpi above what you can see.

your eyes will get used to the higher DPI.

for example. I had a droid razer m and I thought at the time it was a beautiful screen and maintained that for the entire 2 years I carried it.
then I got the droid turbo and thought the screen is overkill! who wants 1440P on a 5 inch phone.
I looked back at that razer m last month and wow I can see the blocks. resolution is soo bad it bothers me! just like going back to your old 480P monitors. with time, you will learn to love it. just get a better panel next time that dosent have so much saturation!

 

[loki1944]

well i can officially say 4k is worthless, picture quality literally looks no better then 1080p. Other then a hit to performance i see no benefit going to 4k yet.

Depends on the game really, for some games 4k+ really does make a difference. Best example though is Skyrim with an ENB since you don't use regular AA with an ENB if you want the full effect, so cranking up the resolution gets you both ENB+killing jaggies.

Nope, the awful putrid color blending just ruins the entire experience. When everything starts to over saturate and melt together, or one color looks incredibly mind numbingly painful to look at. My god, it's just not worth ti. Sure yeah if it's done right if the colors don't look like a baby puked out a roll of crayons, then yes by all means, but no amount of texture fidelity is worth that horrid picture quality yet. Not to mention the performance hits. Going back to my old 1080p monitor.

Im sorry to hear of your bad experience with 4k. Personally ive seen more resolution is always better remove the killing jaggies and increase the color field looks great to me.

You have to be careful with what 4K monitor to buy. many of the cheaper ones and practically everything Samsung ever made have a lot of oversaturation. this can be tweaked to be much better with some simple calibration. I find that when it comes to monitors Dell makes the best and makes you pay for it. they have a 5K monitor with 99% adobe rgb or something crazy that needs 2 dp cables to run at 60hz... crazy. and only $1900! 😛

only one 4k monitor ive seen has refresh rate above 60hz due to current cables not able to carry that needed bandwidth to push 120hz on 4k. for gamers this is a major setback. its the only thing that keeps me from buying one.

the other issue is with scaling and monitor size. 4k for most people (most people have corrected vision) is hard to see unless monitor size is above 24". I wouldn't buy one less than 27" as that seems to be the current sweet spot for monitor size. only windows 10 and OSX have decent scaling for 4k monitors any other OS and you will have to be tweaking for some time.

To claim that colors on 4k cant match those of a 2k monitor is just a farce. monitor tech is the same across the board and a 4k picture quality color wise can match and do better than a 2k monitor as the underlying tech is identical, merely you are buying the cheap TN panels that are being made widely available to the public to increase support for 4K as it is in its infancy. If a good picture quality gaming 2K panel cost $400 and you got a 4K for $450 why expect it to be as good? it cost a lot more to cram those extra pixels on the same space and your paying $50 more. :/

EDIT: not to mention that 4k has 4 times the pixels to tell where to go and the T-con board will be much more expensive to make and the input board will have to be capable of upscaling as nobody wants a 4K panel that cant downscale to 1080, and many games/tv only come in at 1080p and people want to use all the extra pixels so the encoder has to be much faster and internal ram has to be more etc etc etc it is much more expensive to make a 4k panel!

The issue i'm having is for one the contents not their. Even with over saturation tweaks it still looks like hot garbage, i wanna say because of the way it display's colors most media is designed around 1080p or maybe 1440p, not to mention the fact i don't see any difference between a 1080p game vs a 4k one. Quite frankly the picture fidelity looks exactly the same, even took a png of both did a side by side comparison. The other issue is if you want there to be a "difference" improvement, you have to do quite a bit of modding which only adds to the fact 4k is pretty resource heavy, it's just not worth it.

It's worth it if you like the visual improvement and have the hardware to run it well at good fps, which is going to be minimum SLI/CF for demanding games. As to quality, it's just a straight up fact that there is a quality difference, whether the quality difference is worth the performance hit depends on the user and their hardware http://4k.com/resolution/, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O_KP4uJ1-Pc/maxresdefault.jpg.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Another cloud on the horizon for AMD?

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/asetek-demands-amd-cease-sales-of-fury-x.html

 

[Vogner16]

Another cloud on the horizon for AMD?

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/asetek-demands-amd-cease-sales-of-fury-x.html

yay custom cooling for fury x!

 

[-Fran-]

I don't know if that company is just a patent troll or if it's justified. In any case, I wonder why CM continued using those designs if they already lost the case... The development for the Fury cooling shouldn't have been far from that court ruling, right?

Still, I wonder what AMD and nVidia/Gigabyte will say about it.

Cheers!

 

[renz496]

^because CM intend to fight back. Amd already have their official response. (see wccftech which also cover the story)

 

[ccc2rt]

It's written everywhere that 390 is a rebrand of 290, but is there an official source of AMD that confirms that?

 

[Vogner16]

It's written everywhere that 390 is a rebrand of 290, but is there an official source of AMD that confirms that?

on the amd site where it gives the specs of both 290 and 390 to be identical aside from total ram and power consumption.

the 390 is slightly different as it is made with a slightly refined process to help power efficiency of the chip and increase clock speeds. it also is standard to come with twice the vram and the vram is higher clocked. all in all 390 is about 5% faster than 290, but are for all intents and purposes identical.

 

[renz496]

It's written everywhere that 390 is a rebrand of 290, but is there an official source of AMD that confirms that?

if you look at the spec (even from AMD site) you will identical spec between them except clock speed. the chip for the 390 has been tweak further so they can sustain much higher clock. the improvement was supposed to include power management to improve the power consumption as well. but i imagine the the tweak on power consumption has a very small impact on the chip...or probably none. btw it is up to you to view 390X/390 as 290X/290 rebrand or not. even AMD themselves insisting that those 390s are not 290s rebrand.

 

[jimmysmitty]

It's written everywhere that 390 is a rebrand of 290, but is there an official source of AMD that confirms that?

if you look at the spec (even from AMD site) you will identical spec between them except clock speed. the chip for the 390 has been tweak further so they can sustain much higher clock. the improvement was supposed to include power management to improve the power consumption as well. but i imagine the the tweak on power consumption has a very small impact on the chip...or probably none. btw it is up to you to view 390X/390 as 290X/290 rebrand or not. even AMD themselves insisting that those 390s are not 290s rebrand.

Actually per the reviews the 390 series uses more power. As for the tweaks, they didn't do much. Probably just more mature silicon because they tend to be topping out at the same clock speeds as the top in the 290 series was (1200MHz if you are lucky).

Another cloud on the horizon for AMD?

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/asetek-demands-amd-cease-sales-of-fury-x.html

I saw that. This is something that was discussed very early on with Fury Xs release and it is something that was stated that could happen.

While I think patent trolling is BS if AseTek won a case and is using their patents they can legally stop AMD from selling any Fury Xs with that cooler. Since you can buy a AseTek closed loop cooler and they manufacture coolers form other companies then this will probably happen.

I do hope AMD has a backup plan because this wont help them at all.

CM can fight back but I think they will lose. AseTek has their patents and they are using them. This is not just another case of patent trolling but a legitimate patent dispute and either CM pays up or stops production.

 

[Vogner16]

It's written everywhere that 390 is a rebrand of 290, but is there an official source of AMD that confirms that?

if you look at the spec (even from AMD site) you will identical spec between them except clock speed. the chip for the 390 has been tweak further so they can sustain much higher clock. the improvement was supposed to include power management to improve the power consumption as well. but i imagine the the tweak on power consumption has a very small impact on the chip...or probably none. btw it is up to you to view 390X/390 as 290X/290 rebrand or not. even AMD themselves insisting that those 390s are not 290s rebrand.

Actually per the reviews the 390 series uses more power. As for the tweaks, they didn't do much. Probably just more mature silicon because they tend to be topping out at the same clock speeds as the top in the 290 series was (1200MHz if you are lucky).

Overall power consumption is up due to the doubled vram. core power consumption is down and if you get a 390 4gb version they use about 30W less. and clocks at max OC are similar, but the 390's are on a more mature man process and usually hit slightly higher clocks.

I would say for a 290, 390 its irrilevent which one you pick, but I would certainly pick a 390x over a 290x. crossfire performance on a 390x is much better due to that doubled vram.

end of the day dosent matter much.

 

[prtskg]

AMD will use Samsung's foundry too.
http://english.etnews.com/20151222200002
Hope this means no delays in gpus, cpus and apus from AMD due to foundry.
News about HBM2 - http://english.etnews.com/20151223200003
'It is predicted that both businesses’ HBM2 D-RAMs will be mass-produced in first half of 2016 at the earliest.'

 

[jimmysmitty]

AMD will use Samsung's foundry too.
http://english.etnews.com/20151222200002
Hope this means no delays in gpus, cpus and apus from AMD due to foundry.
News about HBM2 - http://english.etnews.com/20151223200003
'It is predicted that both businesses’ HBM2 D-RAMs will be mass-produced in first half of 2016 at the earliest.'

What this tells me is that GloFlo can't produce both Zen and Arctic Islands and AMD is looking to other FABs to fill their particular needs. It also says that GloFlo might not have the yields they are claiming for their 14nm.

It is good news for Samsung though. They always wanted to have a foundry business.

 

[prtskg]

This sounds bad for TSMC as Samsung is replacing TSMC. Using both Samsung and GF will accelerate product launches without additional design.

 

[Hotasice]

I am wondering if say an R9 380 will be able to crossfire with an R9 360, or even 370? Also how well does crossfire scale

 

[renz496]

Is it really bad for TSMC? When it comes to foundry business i heard TSMC still have the most pie. And to be honest i'm skeptical for samsung to build AMD GPU. did samsung ever create chip any bigger than soc? Even GF which build cpu for AMD in the past still can't build it for AMD causing AMD to rely on TSMC.

 

[jerdle]

I am wondering if say an R9 380 will be able to crossfire with an R9 360, or even 370? Also how well does crossfire scale

No, the 380 can only crossfire with other 380s or an R9 285. Crossfire scales very well.

 

[TechGuruGames]

Hello AMD. I think it is time every GPU company starts thinking about the future and make GPU's with more than 8GB or VRAM. GTAV can't be maxed out at 4K as long as it needs 16GB of VRAM and as of now, Titan Z and X have the biggest VRAM amount of 12GB. I think you should make a new series and the 1st GPU of the series being one with 18GB HBM but not offering the biggest FPS numbers (equal ones of the R9 390X). This will make people want to 2 or 3way crossfire the card in order to play GTAV and Upcoming 2016/2017 Games at 2160p60 maxed out (16GB of VRAM will be needed).1080p will be history in 2 years. So take care...

 

[turkey3_scratch]

No, GTAV does not need 16GB VRAM, and no card even has that. That is totally a false statement.

 

[renz496]

1080p will be here for years to come. Right now not even 1440 considered as mainstream on pc right now.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

1080p will be here for years to come. Right now not even 1440 considered as mainstream on pc right now.

Maybe to people on here, but Steam's statistics beg to differ. According to Steam's November survey, only about 3% of PC gamers are on 1440p, with over 35% on 1080p, and about 30% on 768p. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Of course, that's just talking Steam, but the 720p market is still strong.

 

[renz496]

That's my point. So saying that bye bye 1080p in two years is not something that realistic. Most games development still focused on console first. With Xbone 720p still quite the norm and for PS4 more like 900p than 1080p. And both still target 30fps most of the time. So when the title got port to pc most dev still retain console asset. Some triple A games will give more options to pc version of their games but others? Just look at mass effect for example. The pc version were usng 720p texture. EA/Bioware don't even bother to give the game HD texture despite how succesful the franchise is. Good thing that PC is very flexible. Those that want better texture can use mod.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Sometimes when I play PC games, I feel like the textures are too good while the other graphics lack.

 

[TechGuruGames]

No, GTAV does not need 16GB VRAM, and no card even has that. That is totally a false statement.

go and search on google about that, you will see that it needs 16gb of vram at 4K

 

[TechGuruGames]

No, GTAV does not need 16GB VRAM, and no card even has that. That is totally a false statement.

it needs 16gb vram with draw distance at max.