http://videocardz.com/60780/amd-announces-radeon-rx-480
$199 (4 GB)
$230+ (8 GB)
"According to multiple editors (who took part in Polaris Tech Day) Radeon RX 480 would offer performance between GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980."
 

 It presents an attractive option for people still gaming on 1440p and 1080p resolutions

stalinx20
I really don't know what to say to this. Will a single 480 really be able to withstand 8gb of data without crumbling? It sounds like a GTX 960 variation between 2gb and 4gb.

"According to multiple editors (who took part in Polaris Tech Day) Radeon RX 480 would offer performance between GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980."
 
If this is true, Can a card that performs like a GTX 970 use and take benefit of 8GB or GDDR5? 
I say yes.
It seems that we will have two flavours, 4GB (I suppose for 1080p gaming) and 8GB (for 1440p gaming). I want to see reviews!

stalinx20
I really don't know what to say to this. Will a single 480 really be able to withstand 8gb of data without crumbling? It sounds like a GTX 960 variation between 2gb and 4gb.

I'm willing to bet the 8GB model is best suited for running more than one graphics card (either getting one now and the rest later, or all at once), in that sense, it would be fine.  Getting two in crossfire is around $460, which between the GTX1080 and GTX1070FE.  At that point GTX1080, GTX1070FE and 2x RX-480 would all have access to 8GB at 8GHz-- that review would interest me.  But if I were to get RX-480, I'd get one and probably the 4GB model.  I already have an HP Envy 32" 1440p which happens to be Freesync compatible, I'm currently using a very old 180W GTX260.


That said, with RX-480 at 150W and the performance of a GTX980, against a much faster GTX1070 at the same wattage, AMD lost that fight.  They'll only have the energy efficiency argument against their older generations, and all they have against Pascal is price for performance.

seth89
Low wattage, VR ready (8gb), 199 bucks, AMD might have a winner this summer.
 
So who is getting one?
(I would but my cards now still kick butt.)
 
 
 
Somewhat off topic,
now that the new AMD card and Nvidia cards only use up to 150 watts is there really going to be much incentive to add water blocks to our GPUs? 

 
Smaller die size with more data flow, means a hotter card. Just because it uses less wattage doesn't mean that the temperature goes down. If you reduce your wattage by 20% but your decrease the size of the die by 50% your still producing alot of heat.

 

gridironcpj
I'm really not digging AMD's marketing for this card.  It's apparently "high-end graphics" for the masses.  Uh, no.  If this has performance between 970 and 980, then it's not high-end in 2016.  The 970 and 980 were high-end back in 2014.  AMD is going backwards in my opinion with this nonsense.  They're not pushing the industry forward.  What's another $180 to get a 1070?  Are you telling me people are THAT poor?  The 970 was over $300 and the most popular card according to Steam's hardware stats.  AMD needs to get with the times.  Also, ugly reference design as usual.  I can't help but get on AMD's case when they aren't giving Nvidia a run for their money.

I think that was a typo and meant to be 'between a 1070 and 1080'
 
 
 

seta8967

Sajin

 

Huh didnt know they made a 16gb vram version.

They do not, its 8+8 and CF, I think they are showing it off in crossfire.

seth89

seta8967

Sajin

Huh didnt know they made a 16gb vram version.

They do not, its 8+8 and CF, I think they are showing it off in crossfire.

It was sarcasm, vram doesnt stack so its still 8gb.

 
also pay attention to this comment from AMD
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4m692q/concerning_the_aots_image_quality_controversy/ 
where they explain the discrepancy between the AOTS renderings
 
The elephant in the room:
Ashes uses procedural generation based on a randomized seed at launch. The benchmark does look slightly different every time it is run. But that, many have noted, does not fully explain the quality difference people noticed.
At present the GTX 1080 is incorrectly executing the terrain shaders responsible for populating the environment with the appropriate amount of snow. The GTX 1080 is doing less work to render AOTS than it otherwise would if the shader were being run properly. Snow is somewhat flat and boring in color compared to shiny rocks, which gives the illusion that less is being rendered, but this is an incorrect interpretation of how the terrain shaders are functioning in this title.
The content being rendered by the RX 480--the one with greater snow coverage in the side-by-side (the left in these images)--is the correct execution of the terrain shaders.
So, even with fudgy image quality on the GTX 1080 that could improve their performance a few percent, dual RX 480 still came out ahead.
As a parting note, I will mention we ran this test 10x prior to going on-stage to confirm the performance delta was accurate. Moving up to 1440p at the same settings maintains the same performance delta within +/-1%.
 
 
where they say Nvidia is not rendering correctly
 
http://imgur.com/a/pyC3r 
 
also found here
http://videocardz.com/60860/amd-explains-image-quality-in-aots-radeon-rx-480-cf-vs-gtx-1080-demonstration 
 
 
 
AMD ran two different settings AMD was on Extreme 1440 and Nvidia was on Crazy 1440
AMD was using a FASTER intel CPU 3.5GHZ than the Nvidia -3.3GHZ
and AMD did not do all it could to limit Nvidia heat throttling
 
http://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/metaverse#/personas/b0db0294-8cab-4399-8815-f956a670b68f/match-details/8b748568-fc96-4e48-9fed-22666a7149f5 
 
http://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/metaverse#/personas/b0db0294-8cab-4399-8815-f956a670b68f/match-details/6b9e8c43-df70-4cec-8ddb-b209c0316fa8 
 
 
 
LOL - of course there be a visual difference
 
 
the 1080 may have a slight bug in the render(and maybe fix in the drivers later) - but it doesn't change the Framerate
all other Nvidia cards render corrrectly
 
 
 

gridironcpj
Are you telling me people are THAT poor?  The 970 was over $300 and the most popular card according to Steam's hardware stats.

It is ironic you are referring to Steam's Hardware survey yet accusing people of being poor for not getting a more expensive graphics card, it is like you didn't really look at the stats.   
 
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970      4.94%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960      3.28%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti  2.93%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760      2.01%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660      1.51%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650      1.49%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980      1.00%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti   0.95%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950       0.64%

Let's look at primary displays, since you guys make a big deal about resolution:

1920 x 1080     36.81%
1366 x 768       25.72%
2560 x 1440      1.53%

Or even Video memory:

1024 MB     34.56%
2048 MB      26.2%
4096 MB      10.99%
1536 MB        0.56%
3072 MB        1.52%
6144 MB        1.32%

How you consider this a percentage of is up to you, there are 125 million active accounts, and about 5-10% are concurrent, i.e. the regulars.    In any event, RX-480 (and eventually GTX1060) will outsell 1070/1080; midrange has always outsold high-end for the last decade.

lehpron

stalinx20
How you consider this a percentage of is up to you, there are 125 million active accounts, and about 5-10% are concurrent, i.e. the regulars.    In any event, RX-480 (and eventually GTX1060) will outsell 1070/1080; midrange has always outsold high-end for the last decade.

So, it could be possible the 120 million other people might have the 970s. just saying.

Sure, and if they don't regularly log-on, maybe they don't game often with hardware they rarely use.  I'm pretty sure they tally up data from every install as opposed to only those that log in.  Concurrent isn't a set constant, if an average of 1 out of 10 log in at any one time, that doesn't mean only 1 out of 10 bothers to ever log in.  They all log in, just not all at once; that's what concurrent means.


Besides, it was AMD themselves that stated the market size from those that get GTX970/R9-390X or better is around 7.5 million users, and the if the whole point is to bring that level of performance to the masses, they would have to aim at a lower price category to expand the market: They are aiming Polaris into a market of 100 million users.  Didn't anyone watch the live stream from Computex?  Anyway, I'm pretty sure as Xavier suspects, nVidia will quickly bring a GTX1060 to steal spotlight and save as many of their customers from going to RX-480, and it will be priced in the same range as well.

Xavier Zepherious
actually there was a survey done - not steam
that says that over 50% of the cards bought are high end 
between the low and and midrange are still less than high..... end low+mid<high end
and you have to realize low end>midrange because most low end are iGPU - lappies and business computers
...
you do have to realize that most of the midrange to low end are lappie and simple desktop - intel igpu
lappies you can't do much about - people buy laptops and then want to play on the road
...

Been reading articles and whatnot from enthusiast websites and on these forums for over ten years, I'm not naive; only the codenames of products, APIs and games have been changing, it's the same old story:  After associating yourselves with the same enthusiasts that purchase only highest quality for years, many of you are out of touch with the world beyond...  


Companies employ their own market researchers, but when independent firms put out market research reports, they are awesome tools that help plan what to build and who to sell to.  For instance, from JPR (Jon Peddle Research), there was this:  

Enthusiasts like charts like this because it fits with their preconception that enthusiast sales are bigger than everything else, a sense of pride for the side they choose.  But dollar amounts do not equate to unit sales because of the varying premiums; more units at lower ends must be sold than higher ends to get the same dollar amount, this is how one outsells the other.  

Unfortunately, the average joe enthusiast can't just read the entire contents of the research report because they cost $7,500 each to purchase; they are meant for companies to help them plan, not for us.  So we depend on our favorite website to (presumably) get together with others and buy it just to give us the Cliff Notes.  But they don't buy the report, they go after the summary and pick what sounds good, I will link it below.

These enthusiast websites have a bias, they insist on following status quo: They will not publish anything that goes against what many of you expect to see as it risks their readership, like the true size of the multi-GPU market (that data is from JPR too).  None of you want to believe the enthusiast market is tiny, so websites will focus on huge sales numbers and/or percent growth, and let you assume that the PC gaming enthusiast market is giant.  

How big is the PC gaming enthusiast market really?  According to JPR, the couple pages of their report they make available as a sample, on page 1 on their Executive Summary:

"We estimate the Enthusiast gamer population is 16.4 million worldwide"
"There will be just over 21 million Enthusiast PC gamers by 2018"

We don't know how they define 'enthusiast' or what price brackets it refers to, their definitions are on page 42.  As of 2015, they value PC enthusiast market at $10 billion, but divided among their estimated 16 million population, that averages upgrade costs to around $650 for 2015.  In their presentation during Computex 2016, AMD claimed the market size of those that tend to buy GTX970/R9-390X or better is 7.5 million, so clearly Jon Peddle Research added slower cards to their estimates that make it artificially bigger.  My guess, since nVidia calls GTX950 a mainstream card with a enthusiast moniker branding, such tactics may have an impact in the sales and size of the market towards "enthusiasts".

gridironcpj

lehpron

gridironcpj
Are you telling me people are THAT poor?  The 970 was over $300 and the most popular card according to Steam's hardware stats.

It is ironic you are referring to Steam's Hardware survey yet accusing people of being poor for not getting a more expensive graphics card, it is like you didn't really look at the stats.   
 
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970      4.94%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960      3.28%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti  2.93%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760      2.01%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660      1.51%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650      1.49%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980      1.00%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti   0.95%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950       0.64%

Let's look at primary displays, since you guys make a big deal about resolution:

1920 x 1080     36.81%
1366 x 768       25.72%
2560 x 1440      1.53%

Or even Video memory:

1024 MB     34.56%
2048 MB      26.2%
4096 MB      10.99%
1536 MB        0.56%
3072 MB        1.52%
6144 MB        1.32%

How you consider this a percentage of is up to you, there are 125 million active accounts, and about 5-10% are concurrent, i.e. the regulars.    In any event, RX-480 (and eventually GTX1060) will outsell 1070/1080; midrange has always outsold high-end for the last decade.

Uh, how was what I said wrong?  The GTX 970 is the most popular graphics solution according to the Steam Hardware and Software survey.  Perhaps you're the one who didn't really look at the stats?  Or you just feel like arguing for the sake of arguing.  Your claim that the RX-480 will outsell the 1070/1080 is not as straightforward as you're thinking.  Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean it'll outsell something more expensive.  The survey you just referenced proves that (GTX 970 vs. 960).  Relative price points are key here.  The main difference I see this time around is the fact that AMD is actually releasing something much sooner this time around relative to Nvidia's release, as opposed to last generation (R9 390 and 390X were direct competitors to the 970 and 980, but released almost a year later).  Another thing to keep in mind is that the 1070 destroys the RX-480, so you'll need two 480s if you want at least the performance of a 1070.  Not only is that slightly more expensive (if we're going by base prices), but multi-GPU setups are not very popular among casual mainstream consumers.

Yeah, the claim that the 480 will outsell the Pascal series is pretty far-fetched, I willagree. Without any doubt, the 4xx series from AMD is an affordable series, but it will not be as powerful as Pascal (ever), until we see "Vega" come out, but that's the problem. AMD should have started out with Vega first, and then released the 480 and 470, because by the time they even release Vega, Nvidia will probably be planning to launch Volta, and may even be in production.

Xavier Zepherious
volta is already in production -test tape outs and in the driver listings within the Nvidia drivers so they can test the chips
volume production for servers begin in fall or winter quarter - because they have to start installing 1st quarter next year
 
so Duh!!! AMD is way behind the 8 ball here - vega can't save them - at best it might meet 1080 but not titan p or 1080ti which will be out by then...with volta within fingertip reach
 
the problem was they cut the engineering staff for R&D in the RadeonTechnologyGroup (the part of the company that was make profits) and put it in the area losing money
huh??? like wha?? has AMD made much progress in mobile or CPU side? Noooooo
and at the cost of wrecking the GPU side - thx to rory reed 
 
Kadori is trying to save the gpu side - it will take time to bring back good engineers when your cash strapped - get rid of some dead weight, find new young blood and ideas
 
they can't do it losing money each quarter for 8 yrs running and try to attract and pay for staff
what they need is someone with deep pockets to buy up AMD and save it
 
the saudis are the biggest investors that have been bailing them out - but with oil prices at all time lows the faucet is running low or is shut off
and why AMD has been doing side deals to keep cash reserves up

I hear Samsung being whispered in the wind sweeping AMD right off its feet....