AMD RX 400 series (Polaris) MegaThread! FAQ & Resources

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A quick, yet obnoxious, update to my Freesync endeavors: fired up DOOM (2016) and since i have it using Vulkan, it's pegged above 100Hz most of the time; you can notice the smoothness while moving. I saw no tearing either, which is amazing. I spent a good while moving around, jumping and shooting making sure it was consistent. All I can say is that it's amazeballs XD

Cheers!
 


This is on hardware sites though (and I agree, Wtfbbqtech comments are 'interesting' to say the least). My point is that when you get outside of the hardcore enthusiasts- the AMD 'supporters' don't exist. If someone inexperienced asks for advice, you have to be pretty brave these days to recommend *anything* by AMD. nVidia seem to have much wider mind share- slightly odd if you ask me given AMD power all the consoles (where the inexperienced *edit- in terms of PC hardware* gamers often come from). I really think AMD marketing team missed a trick not to get 'graphics powered by AMD' as a splash screen on *every* console title....
 
I still waiting for the RX 480 and 470 laptops to hit the market. I was looking at the 1060 laptops but they are way out of my price range (I'm looking at $1,000 after CA tax), so I'm hoping the 470 and 480 based ones fit into my range. I almost got impatient and got a ASUS laptop with a 950m, but with the new GPU's coming out already, I just can't see spending that much on much weaker tech.
 


lol over the years i have recommend a lot of radeon to people because of their price/performance advantage 😛 it is not really that odd that nvidia own much of that market share. even before the new console coming out nvidia already have establish quite a dominance in market share. the new console coming out by the end of 2013. if i remember correctly nvidia able to get around 65% market share in Q3 2012. so nvidia already had the dominance for over a year before the console hit the market.

now we see AMD start gaining more market share. part of it we start seeing the console effect on PC titles. in some recent titles AMD 7970/280X already able to rival nvidia GTX780 where as in 2012 those card were only competing with 680 like performance. and since their hardware in MS console now AMD also have more influence to direct the API development that suited their hardware more. even in the upcoming SM6 preview i already heard that there will be new feature that will benefit AMD hardware the most.

the wind now are blowing to AMD advantage. now it is up to them to use it properly. although it still not going to be easy for them because of their financial situation are very tight. very very tight. i haven't check it myself but they say AMD graphic division already losing money for two quarters straight.
 
When it comes to laptop it is a bit complicated. Amd or nvidia did not simply sell the gpu to OEM. they also help OEM in designing the laptop and this is also cost money on amd/nvidia side. back in 2012/2013 AMD rejecting most OEM deal for laptop if OEM did not agree to sell laptop with AMD product in certain volume that AMD think it worth the R&D spend on it. It is one of Rory Read initiatives to lessen the bleeding of the company. The end result awas we have seen today. nvidia also face similar issue back then but they still do it anyway despite the return are small because they try to claw market share in laptop discrete graphic because amd own 60% of the market. With kepler they have more competitive and power efficient design to offer. But what nvidia did not expect back then was amd end up turn down many OEM deal.
 
@renz
Yeah, it makes sense if what you're saying is true. If they have to incur in extra costs other than just selling the GPUs (and making the base MXM design), then given how thin the margins are already in that market, they are indeed better getting into other more profitable markets for now.

@jaymc
It is entirely possible and since they seem to have pushed Vega a couple of Quarters down the road, then it would make sense to have something there to fill in the gap to fight nVidia's higher tier. I do not like the idea to be honest and it does little business sense to me, but I don't hold all of the cards. I still wouldn't advocate for such a card unless it's price is more than tempting and the performance justifies it. Even with dual cards issues, DX12 should take away some of the usual pains going forward.

I just hope they don't screw up the naming again. Although I would imagine they want to keep the "Fury" branding going, so Vega would make sense to be there, I guess? Still, I'd rather call it RX480X2 or RX485 if it's a dual GPU card.

Cheers!
 
There are a number of articles saying the RX 490 will be polaris this year and an equal no saying its vega next year none seem to have any new information than the same speculation that was around months ago at least as far as I can tell. Unless anyone can confirm otherwise officially RX 480 is the biggest polaris card and vega will be out next year with HBM2, anything about a dual 480 called a 490 is pure speculation based around a promotion that runs until the end of the year stating a 490 was included in it but was removed quickly and was most likely a mistake. Though the card does make sense considering the time Nvidia has the high end of the market to themselves there has been nothing from AMD saying an RX 490 will be out this year or there will be any type of dual 480 ever.
Not that speculation isn't fun and could turn out correct
 
AMD is killing off the firepro brand.

Check this article out "AMD Radeon PRO SSG".

http://vrworld.com/2016/08/05/amd-radeon-pro-ssg-support-4tb-memory/
 


The first GPU I ever bought was from ATI and I loved it. It seems that AMD thinks that they will be removing the last remnants of ATI (even though Radeon was ATI) by changing the Firepro name.

I really don't get what is going on with companies these days. They build up a brand name, then decide to kill it off for something new (referring to Blizzard renaming Battle.net as well). I hope this works for them as they can't afford missteps for a while.

As for the tech, based on Polaris 10 is interesting, I would think that with a potential 4tb of memory, it would be based on the top end Vega, but it is very interesting what AMD is working on and if they execute it right, they could really make a comeback and give nVidia a some serious competition.
 
Well apparently the ATI team are still there...(I loved those cards too btw) and the ATI / Radeon team are the only entity in AMD that has consistently made money even through all the bad time's.... And it seem's the old dogs are coming up trumps for AMD again... As they steal market share on their nemesis Nvidia...

Check it:
http://www.game-debate.com/news/21470/amd-steals-huge-chunk-of-gaming-gpu-market-share-from-nvidia

Thing's are really on the up for AMD with Radeon Graphics and will only get better it seem's with the release of Vega... well until Nvidia's Volta.
Which they seem to be scrambling to get ready.
They moved it a year forward, let's see if they can achieve that. Surely because of the treat Vega poses.... oh interesting times were living in. It seemed like AMD was going bankrupt only short while ago... Now it's lookin like they are playing an absolute stormer.

Maybe it was the kick in the ass they needed.. nothing like the treat of looming death to motivate you eh. An of coarse we have Zen on the horizon....They may just have intel scratching their heads bout now wondering if they should redesign their chip from the ground up...
Go AMD, rise from the ashes !! They should change their name to Phoenix technology's... :lol:

Jay

 
while they did gain some market share from nvidia i also heard that their graphic division has been losing money for two quarters straight. last quarter AMD finally in the black but without the deal they got with China they will still in the red. and i'm not really sure if those deal with China are good for AMD for long term. just look at what happen to Qualcomm recently. Q3 will be interesting to how the market share goes.

and for whatever it is worth don't hype Zen too much and underestimate intel. intel scratching their heads? it is AMD that scratching their heads on how to tell people that they have something better than intel.
 
AMD isn't out of the woods yet. If the Zen launch isn't a huge success, they may end up selling off or spinning off the GPU division. However, the GPU division is the only reason AMD didn't go belly up years ago.

The RX series has been very successful and starting in the mid-range has achieved a lot of what they wanted, i.e. market share. Vega has some stiff competition coming out of the gate, but AMD can probably tune their cards to measure up well.

It almost seems like nVidia were sleeping at the wheel with Pascal and DX12, so it will be interesting to see what Volta has, but I don't think Volta will be out until at least Q4 2017 as they will need time to make a profit on Pascal. Which makes me wonder if they are close to that or still in the red.

One other thing I find interesting is how core clock speed doesn't seem all that important in this generation. Looking at the high clock rates of Pascal and the comparatively "low" clocks on the clocks on RX 400 cards. The 480 and 1060 are a decent match up in DX12 yet the 1060 is clocked much higher.
 
nvidia will accelerate things up if there is a need to do so. if you look how fast nvidia pumping up new pascal based card i say nvidia already do so. nvidia probably counting on the professional market with pascal. those HPC with kepler based tesla nvidia probably hoping some of them to be upgraded with pascal based accelerator. also initially pascal did not exist in nvidia roadmap. pascal exist because there are certain things that nvidia want to do with volta cannot be done in time if they want to release volta in 2016. looking how pascal resemble a lot with maxwell some said pascal is just extension or minor changes on what nvidia has done with maxwell. at least that's how it goes for gaming variant of Pascal since GP100 was very different than maxwell. real changes probably will only coming with pascal.

also i see many people comparing how low clocked polaris able to match up very nicely with high clocked pascal. while that is true 1060 for example also have much lower shader count compared to RX480. die size also smaller for 1060. that's why for years we say it is useless to compared the core clock for nvidia and AMD cards because the architecture are built differently.
 


True, nVidia can accelerate things, but they would likely take a bit of a hit on Pascal should they move too quickly. They need to move a certain number or units before they turn an actual profit on each generation of GPU, so it seems reasonable that Pascal will be around for a while longer. Plus, we don't even know if Volta's design is finalized.

As for the core clock rates, that was what I'm getting at. It is interesting to see similar performance with such different configurations. Reminds me of the AMD vs Intel GHz race.

I'm trying to not get into the Vega hype too much, but I wish the rumors of it coming out this month had been true. That would have been a great "October surprise".
 


I think the comments of 'Pascal is just Maxwell' are a bit unfair... some of the best products are revisions of previous designs (for processors look at AMD Phenom I -> Phenom II for example). It's true, a new process helps to some extent, but AMD have shown that the new process doesn't automatically result in nearly 2 ghz peak clock rate for a large processor like a GPU.

The clock speed gain between the R9 300 series and Polaris is what you would typically expect without a radical redesign of the architecture- which is what, about 20%? nVidia achieved quite a bit more than that with Pascal- which has meant they are pushing serious performance out of pretty small chips, yet they haven't blown their power budgets (quite the opposite actually). I think some seriously good optimization work went into Pascal. On the AMD side, there are certainly titles where the improvements in Polaris show (with it handily besting technically more powerful Hawaii based boards) however most of the time it's more a case of Polaris offering the same performance at a lower price point (although I can't argue with the efficiency improvement).
 
Ok guy's Vega is rumored to be getting announced at the supercomputer show in November... It's supposed to be the workstation version but...

What do we know about Vega itself other than it's memory ??

Anyone got any juicy details.... How good is it ? Will it give Nvidia a run for their money in the high end market ??

J
 


nothing much apart from the leak that we show from VCZ. anyway AMD always being the cheaper alternative to nvidia even in professional market. but in professional market getting the job done is more important than being cheap. hence nvidia still hold the market share in professional gpu despite amd have cheap and better spec hardware on paper.
 


Yeah, AMD is doing a killer job of holding back real information on the rest of the 400 series. By now we usually had some basic performance leaks.

I've been hearing a lot about many software developers moving away from CUDA because it pigeon holes companies into buying more expensive hardware. The one thing I really can't stand is proprietary software or hardware...vendor lock-in, ugh!
 


for software developer most often they will support both CUDA and OpenCL because they want their software to be compatible with all available hardware. nvidia pushing CUDA is more for business reason and they already spend a lot of R&D developing them. and everyone else are free to compete with their solution to the point they allowed people to freely look at CUDA. that's why AMD did not get into trouble with nvidia with their boltzman initiatives. actually AMD intend to do exactly this with Mantle initially. they intend to let intel or nvidia see mantle spec but for mantle development AMD will have full control like how nvidia have full control over CUDA.
 
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