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

[Embra]

The RX 480 competes directly with the 1060. Sadly, the 490/490x will not be out until end of year. They will be competing with the 1070/1080. The 480 was never supposed to play all games at 60 fps 1440p, but is will play many at playable rates. That is game dependent.

 

[-Fran-]

If AMD releases a dual RX480, I'm just gonna flip a table.

Cheers! xD

 

[Math Geek]

yup seeing 4-5 fps increase with the 1060 oc's across various reviews. so i would not expect any new 1060 to come along and raise this much at all. if a 480 can oc as high as it looks like, then it will be solid competition for the 1060 and will probably take the price/performance crown unless the 1060 drops in price.

but power usage will be higher for the 480 so we'll be back to that stupid argument for why nvidia is better. even though the fanboys have been downplaying the power needs of pascal with "who cares about power usage" comments. but somehow i think we'll be back to accusations of "furnace" and "space heater" type comments again as that's all the nvidia fanboys will have to argue with AGAIN

 

[Embra]

yup seeing 4-5 fps increase with the 1060 oc's across various reviews. so i would not expect any new 1060 to come along and raise this much at all. if a 480 can oc as high as it looks like, then it will be solid competition for the 1060 and will probably take the price/performance crown unless the 1060 drops in price.

but power usage will be higher for the 480 so we'll be back to that stupid argument for why nvidia is better. even though the fanboys have been downplaying the power needs of pascal with "who cares about power usage" comments. but somehow i think we'll be back to accusations of "furnace" and "space heater" type comments again as that's all the nvidia fanboys will have to argue with AGAIN

Haha... All these arguments can be rather stupid about a few fps here and there. But we continue to argue.

I think the Nitro will be the card to see in a benchmark. I heard "rumor" that there may be a Vapor X edition.

 

[cdrkf]

yup seeing 4-5 fps increase with the 1060 oc's across various reviews. so i would not expect any new 1060 to come along and raise this much at all. if a 480 can oc as high as it looks like, then it will be solid competition for the 1060 and will probably take the price/performance crown unless the 1060 drops in price.

but power usage will be higher for the 480 so we'll be back to that stupid argument for why nvidia is better. even though the fanboys have been downplaying the power needs of pascal with "who cares about power usage" comments. but somehow i think we'll be back to accusations of "furnace" and "space heater" type comments again as that's all the nvidia fanboys will have to argue with AGAIN

What I find most amusing is if we go back a few gens, they've conveniently forgotten the time when AMD had a significant perf/w advantage in graphics (HD 4000, HD5000, HD6000 and HD7000 until Kepler came out)... Then it was "power doesn't matter it's all about performance" 😛

I've said it before and I'll say it again- nVidia's greatest strength is their marketing. Every generation, they spin it so that 'they are the most advanced / are ahead' and it gets taken as fact. nVidia have some great kit, but I don't see them as being particularly ahead of the game recently- as always there are pros and cons to either side.

 

[BurgerandChips66]

While I prefer to use less power and therefore save money on my electricity bills, the consumption of AMD cards (such as the RX 480) is now at a level that I'm really not bothered now.

I don't game more than about 10 hours a week these days and even then it is likely to be during off-peak tariff times. So even if my card uses (say) 100 watts more than the alternative card (on average) then the extra cost per year is negligible (less than 6€) in my country. In reality we aren't even talking about anywhere near that figure I expect.

I would rather save money by buying a cheaper card that offers similar performance - even if it is less performance - so long as it is sufficient performance for my needs and offers the best 'bang for buck'.

That's why Polaris is looking like a really good deal to me. I don't plan on upgrading my main rig used for work and sound / video editing (a 980Ti) anytime soon, but for my day to day gaming and messing around machine I quite fancy a custom RX 480 over the GTX 1060 atm.

Though I will sit it out and wait until everything is released and reviewed before parting with my cash!

 

[El Bandito]

Just saw a review on RX 480 ASUS STRIX (i am sure it will pop in google if you type it)
I dont even know what to think of it.

 

[17seconds]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_480_STRIX_OC/23.html

 

[17seconds]

GPU overclocking works slightly better than with the AMD reference design, reaching 1355 MHz (3% overclock).

Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 3.0%.

 

[-Fran-]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_480_STRIX_OC/2.html

That is the only one I could find for the STRIX.

The price used is $259USD, but there is no way in hell Asus is going to price the STRIX $259. I saw it in the UK for pre-order at £290GBP, so it's going to be at least $50USD premium over the reference RX480. Given the performance numbers in that review the value is mediocre at best, even with the improved thermals and reduced noise (at full speed, they are actually very loud anyway).

We need more reviews with custom cards to find the best xD

Cheers!

 

[TehPenguin]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_480_STRIX_OC/2.html

That is the only one I could find for the STRIX.

The price used is $259USD, but there is no way in hell Asus is going to price the STRIX $259. I saw it in the UK for pre-order at £290GBP, so it's going to be at least $50USD premium over the reference RX480. Given the performance numbers in that review the value is mediocre at best, even with the improved thermals and reduced noise (at full speed, they are actually very loud anyway).

We need more reviews with custom cards to find the best xD

Cheers!

Yeah and the release rate is toooooooooooo sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. I so wanted to go team read just to support the development but the amount of time they make you wait... ugh. I just emailed my retailer to get me a 1060 since they're plentiful(compared to custom 480's).

A shame, I was curious how much I could get with async compute in the future.

I wonder if it's rather bad marketing and not the actual performance of the GPU's that made AMD lose market share.

EDIT: I have to add! In Europe the cheaper custom(!!) 1060's sell for roughly the same as the 8GB model of the 480(reference!). Really weird how AMD deals with things.

 

[simon12]

These guys bench the strix 3% better than reference in standard mode & by 7% in overclocked mode 8% with a manual overclock plus you can get 5% on top of these swith a manual memory overclock https://www.computerbase.de/2016-07/asus-radeon-rx-480-strix-test/2/
They are testing only 4 games though.

 

[renz496]

nVidia are desperately trying to downplay hardware Async as it's something they don't have- the fact is however they are adding it into their cards with Volta. That there tells you everything you need to know on the subject- if nVidia's position of 'it doesn't matter, we can do it in software' was valid, they wouldn't be wasting transistors adding it into their hardware. It doesn't mean nVidia cards are terrible or should be avoided, however I do think that the comparatively cheap AMD cards represent a potential bargain- their (comparatively) poor DX11 performance has forced the prices down very low given the capabilities of many of these cards, DX12 and Vulkan are starting to show what the cards can really do.

and that's part of the problem. AMD cards cannot reach their full potential without low level API. and lets face it not ALL games going to use low level API. this is from anandtech:

Meanwhile, because this is a question that I’m frequently asked, I will make a very high level comparison to AMD. Ever since the transition to unified shader architectures, AMD has always favored higher ALU counts; Fiji had more ALUs than GM200, mainstream Polaris 10 has nearly as many ALUs as high-end GP104, etc. All other things held equal, this means there are more chances for execution bubbles in AMD’s architectures, and consequently more opportunities to exploit concurrency via async compute. We’re still very early into the Pascal era – the first game supporting async on Pascal, Rise of the Tomb Raider, was just patched in last week – but on the whole I don’t expect NVIDIA to benefit from async by as much as we’ve seen AMD benefit. At least not with well-written code.

people think it was impressive for AMD cards to gain large improvement from async compute but when we try looking at it closely AMD current architecture probably have issues to utilize it's full potential that they need async compute aid where as this is not much of an issue on nvidia architecture.

and i don't think nvidia "desperately" downplaying async compute. async compute is very general term. nvidia actually has been dealing with async compute ever since fermi. even for maxwell they have asynchronous time warp which is another form of async compute. with pascal they add the load balancing. right now nvidia just don't have ACE like hardware in their gpu.

 

[renz496]

Some unverified benchmarks of a Sapphire Nitro RX 480 OC @ 1420MHz....

https://imgur.com/a/sw5u3#PSkmOZQ

Seems to more than match a GTX 1060 OC @ 2100MHz.

I think the 'official' launch of this card is in about 24 hours time.

i will wait official review. some people claim that any custom RX480 will be able to reach 1400mhz no problem. and we already seen the numbers from Strix RX480.

 

[renz496]

yup seeing 4-5 fps increase with the 1060 oc's across various reviews. so i would not expect any new 1060 to come along and raise this much at all. if a 480 can oc as high as it looks like, then it will be solid competition for the 1060 and will probably take the price/performance crown unless the 1060 drops in price.

but power usage will be higher for the 480 so we'll be back to that stupid argument for why nvidia is better. even though the fanboys have been downplaying the power needs of pascal with "who cares about power usage" comments. but somehow i think we'll be back to accusations of "furnace" and "space heater" type comments again as that's all the nvidia fanboys will have to argue with AGAIN

What I find most amusing is if we go back a few gens, they've conveniently forgotten the time when AMD had a significant perf/w advantage in graphics (HD 4000, HD5000, HD6000 and HD7000 until Kepler came out)... Then it was "power doesn't matter it's all about performance" 😛

I've said it before and I'll say it again- nVidia's greatest strength is their marketing. Every generation, they spin it so that 'they are the most advanced / are ahead' and it gets taken as fact. nVidia have some great kit, but I don't see them as being particularly ahead of the game recently- as always there are pros and cons to either side.

during GT200 vs HD4000 nvidia actually more power efficient. the mess was fermi generation. and i have seen that "power doesn't matter" comment from both sides. not from nvidia fanboi only. also it is AMD that insist that power efficiency is very important (they also talking about this with polaris). remember this one?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCi5hiIO4fs

 

[renz496]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_480_STRIX_OC/2.html

That is the only one I could find for the STRIX.

The price used is $259USD, but there is no way in hell Asus is going to price the STRIX $259. I saw it in the UK for pre-order at £290GBP, so it's going to be at least $50USD premium over the reference RX480. Given the performance numbers in that review the value is mediocre at best, even with the improved thermals and reduced noise (at full speed, they are actually very loud anyway).

We need more reviews with custom cards to find the best xD

Cheers!

Yeah and the release rate is toooooooooooo sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. I so wanted to go team read just to support the development but the amount of time they make you wait... ugh. I just emailed my retailer to get me a 1060 since they're plentiful(compared to custom 480's).

A shame, I was curious how much I could get with async compute in the future.

I wonder if it's rather bad marketing and not the actual performance of the GPU's that made AMD lose market share.

EDIT: I have to add! In Europe the cheaper custom(!!) 1060's sell for roughly the same as the 8GB model of the 480(reference!). Really weird how AMD deals with things.

i think AMD repeating the same mistake that they did with 290X. though this time it is not as bad as 290X launch.

 

[ThrashDeathDoom]

i'm super pissed that i've been staying up til 3 o clock in the morning every night for a week trying to get even a<mod edit> reference RX 480 i feel so screwed lol

<Watch your language in these forums>

 

[BurgerandChips66]

It will be interesting to see if the ASUS Strix RX 480 performs the same in other reviews. If it does then I find it rather underwhelming. Overclocking was abysmal in my opinion.

There are reviews where reference cards have been overclocked up to ~1375MHz (Joker Productions on Youtube springs to mind). The overclock was stable and allowed benchmarking with games.

As this is the first official review of a custom RX 480 I have seen, I have to say it's not a good start. I'm still hopeful for the Sapphire Nitro card as they never disappoint and usually overclock well from my experience, but this is Polaris we are talking about now...

 

[renz496]

i heard sapphire nitro can hit 1420mhz. but with this i think 1350mhz~1375mhz probably the upper limit on most RX480. this reminds me of VCZ articles on people putting custom cooler on RX480 reference. one tech site have 4 RX480 (2 from AMD and another 2 from retail channel). among the four only one able to hit 1400mhz. people thinking AIB cards with better PCB design and more power will solve the problem. but it is possible this is the limit of the chip itself just how GP104 limit is around 2.0-2.1Ghz.

 

[cdrkf]

i heard sapphire nitro can hit 1420mhz. but with this i think 1350mhz~1375mhz probably the upper limit on most RX480. this reminds me of VCZ articles on people putting custom cooler on RX480 reference. one tech site have 4 RX480 (2 from AMD and another 2 from retail channel). among the four only one able to hit 1400mhz. people thinking AIB cards with better PCB design and more power will solve the problem. but it is possible this is the limit of the chip itself just how GP104 limit is around 2.0-2.1Ghz.

I read somewhere that both Polaris GPU's were intended as low power mobile parts... and that AMD decided to repurpose them last minute to better compete with Pascal on the desktop....

Can't remember where that was though. If that is the case the relatively low clock speeds (compared to nVidia at least) might be down to the design of the GPU. If it was in fact intended to be used in laptops at circa 1ghz for example then they're pushing it quite hard.

That'd also explain the comparatively poor power consumption (I think this has happened with a few generations of AMD cards recently, they've had tougher competition than anticipated so clocked the cards as high as they'll go at the expense of efficiency- just look at how much more efficient R9 Nano is vs Fury X yet the clock difference is fairly small).

 

[17seconds]

Polaris was intended to be a full generation of its own and compete on the high-end enthusiast segment. Problems with production quality and Nvidia's surprising performance led them to re-brand these as mid-range only cards.

 

[cdrkf]

Polaris was intended to be a full generation of its own and compete on the high-end enthusiast segment. Problems with production quality and Nvidia's surprising performance led them to re-brand these as mid-range only cards.

That road map doesn't state anything about market segment- and that argument doesn't hold water when you considder:

AMD knew the specifications of the Polaris 10 gpu when they created it- and it is a less powerful gpu (by any measure) than their existing Hawaii and Fiji silicone.

The argument 'they dropped it to mid range due to nVidia' is nonsense because the card is mid range against their own existing product stack.What you are describing is them creating a massive, high core count chip like Fiji, and marketing THAT as a 'x80' part due to a performance problem. That just isn't what happened here- Polaris 10 is a small, mid range part (it happens to be the exact same size as Pitcarin). There is no way ANYONE at AMD expected it to go in any higher of a market segment than it did based on those specifications. The only potential change nVidia might have forced is they dropped the price of it slightly- I'd have guessed they would have preferred to sell it at $250 instead of $200 for the base model.

 

[-Fran-]

These two cards are the ones I'd like to see face each other in a "value" contest: G1 Gaming 1060[/ur] and [url="https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sapphire-radeon-rx-480-nitro-oc-8192mb-gddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-37b-sp.html"]Nitro+ RX480.

Cheers!

 

[Rogue Leader]

i heard sapphire nitro can hit 1420mhz. but with this i think 1350mhz~1375mhz probably the upper limit on most RX480. this reminds me of VCZ articles on people putting custom cooler on RX480 reference. one tech site have 4 RX480 (2 from AMD and another 2 from retail channel). among the four only one able to hit 1400mhz. people thinking AIB cards with better PCB design and more power will solve the problem. but it is possible this is the limit of the chip itself just how GP104 limit is around 2.0-2.1Ghz.

I read somewhere that both Polaris GPU's were intended as low power mobile parts... and that AMD decided to repurpose them last minute to better compete with Pascal on the desktop....

Can't remember where that was though. If that is the case the relatively low clock speeds (compared to nVidia at least) might be down to the design of the GPU. If it was in fact intended to be used in laptops at circa 1ghz for example then they're pushing it quite hard.

That'd also explain the comparatively poor power consumption (I think this has happened with a few generations of AMD cards recently, they've had tougher competition than anticipated so clocked the cards as high as they'll go at the expense of efficiency- just look at how much more efficient R9 Nano is vs Fury X yet the clock difference is fairly small).

For some reason I remember this as well, however since I can't really remember where it was for all we know it could have come from WCCTech which makes it questionable intel at best....

 

[renz496]

i heard sapphire nitro can hit 1420mhz. but with this i think 1350mhz~1375mhz probably the upper limit on most RX480. this reminds me of VCZ articles on people putting custom cooler on RX480 reference. one tech site have 4 RX480 (2 from AMD and another 2 from retail channel). among the four only one able to hit 1400mhz. people thinking AIB cards with better PCB design and more power will solve the problem. but it is possible this is the limit of the chip itself just how GP104 limit is around 2.0-2.1Ghz.

I read somewhere that both Polaris GPU's were intended as low power mobile parts... and that AMD decided to repurpose them last minute to better compete with Pascal on the desktop....

Can't remember where that was though. If that is the case the relatively low clock speeds (compared to nVidia at least) might be down to the design of the GPU. If it was in fact intended to be used in laptops at circa 1ghz for example then they're pushing it quite hard.

That'd also explain the comparatively poor power consumption (I think this has happened with a few generations of AMD cards recently, they've had tougher competition than anticipated so clocked the cards as high as they'll go at the expense of efficiency- just look at how much more efficient R9 Nano is vs Fury X yet the clock difference is fairly small).

the mobile part is should be polaris 11. doubt that the whole polaris was meant for mobile only. but yes back then we hear lots of rumor. and most of them are hyping polaris. one that i can still remember is polaris 10 probably also a mobile part. then people speculate the one that will be use in desktop card will be even faster. at the very least people expect for desktop polaris to compete head to head with nvidia GP104.