AMD's Tonga - R9 285 (Specs) and R9 285X (Partial Specs)

[Attic]

Booya! Review Popped!




And happy to say, well worth the wait. Excellent review. Hope Ryan keeps the GPU review duties. Top shelf.

-card looks better than I had it pegged after reading
-don't like furmark for power draw, glad it's not only load power usage scenario
-glad AMD taken to task over marketing this card as 1440p suitable, hope other direct and clear remarks land when nVidia gets off the range with their claims

 

[psolord]

Mantle has advantages but it is even more dependent on driver support. The game dev has a lot of control but what if 3+ years down the line you launch a new GPU architecture? The game maker isn't going to modify the game after than long so it falls on your shoulders to try and fix the bugs, which on such a low level architecture may be significantly harder.

This also shows the dependence of mantle on fine tuning the design to the game; without that fine tuning you may have problems.

It looks like the 760 and 770 have dropped almost perfectly in price. Cheapest 760 and 770 are $205 (after rebate) and $280 respectively.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3938566&SID=

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3938566&SID=

3 years down the line the cards of that time will chew up the DX rendering path of today's games anyway.

Mantle should boost current gen games on current gpus first and foremost.

The 285 is current hardware though so it should fall in this category. Let's wait and see.

 

[AtenRa]

The driver used for every R9 285 review is BETA, wait for the next official driver for Mantle support for the R9 285.

 

[yannigr]

Mantle performance is disappointing, or maybe I could say that Mantle is turning to something with no future if every new card ends up with negative impact on performance compared to DirectX.

On the other hand, I wonder if the processor used here has something to do with it. We do know that Mantle helps slower processors, so maybe when using for example an FX processor, Mantle could still perform better than DirectX11. Just not as much as someone would expect/hope.

Anyway the review is much more than what I was expecting to see.

 

[Enigmoid]

The driver used for every R9 285 review is BETA, wait for the next official driver for Mantle support for the R9 285.

Very true. Though it is disappointing given that AMD keeps saying that Mantle is so little work to not have working drivers on day 1.

3 years down the line the cards of that time will chew up the DX rendering path of today's games anyway.

Mantle should boost current gen games on current gpus first and foremost.

The 285 is current hardware though so it should fall in this category. Let's wait and see.

At today's rate of progress? Likely not, especially for 1400p or 4k, don't forget that the R280X is based on silicon that is more than 2.5 years old.

Progress is slowing down.

 

[youshotwhointhe]

Seems clear that AMD are prepping architecture and uncore improvements for carrizo. The frame buffer compression, 16-bit float support, and improved tesselation all allow for better performance in low bandwidth situations. Combined with DDR4 we could see a decent increase in graphics performance. The 4K encode/decode/scaler are a must if they want to get carrizo into 4K laptops.

 

[richaron]

"AMD's 2012 APU Feature Roadmap. AKA: A Brief Guide To GCN"

If Tonga is finally up to the "System Integration" stage (as Ryan speculates), HSA is ready to be extended onto a discrete GPU. I know PCIe isn't anywhere near as good as local cache, but [3.0 x16] bandwidth is in the same ballpark as current system memory. AMD roadmaps aren't showing new performance parts until 2016... but I'd be pretty happy with a 6+ 'core' Carrizo chip with minimal/no GCN parts on die (but still HSA) in the FM2+ platform.

Am I dreaming? Would this be what "System Integration" in Tonga is for?

 

[AtenRa]

Very true. Though it is disappointing given that AMD keeps saying that Mantle is so little work to not have working drivers on day 1.

I believe they wait for 285X or GM204 to release the driver

 

[ShintaiDK]

I believe they wait for 285X or GM204 to release the driver

So you are saying they penalize their own buyers in a wait game?

 

[AtenRa]

So you are saying they penalize their own buyers in a wait game?

NV does the same, both of them release new drivers with performance gains months after the original GPU launch. Nothing new here.

 

[Paul98]

Has anyone seen good Memory Overclock/Underclock benchmarks on these cards? I am interested to know how much the improvements helped in that respect. Along with how it could affect APU performance.

 

[NTMBK]

Seems clear that AMD are prepping architecture and uncore improvements for carrizo. The frame buffer compression, 16-bit float support, and improved tesselation all allow for better performance in low bandwidth situations. Combined with DDR4 we could see a decent increase in graphics performance. The 4K encode/decode/scaler are a must if they want to get carrizo into 4K laptops.

16-bit float seems more of an Android-targeted improvement to be honest. Should really help out the Skybridge ARM chip.

 

[yannigr]

Seems clear that AMD are prepping architecture and uncore improvements for carrizo. The frame buffer compression, 16-bit float support, and improved tesselation all allow for better performance in low bandwidth situations. Combined with DDR4 we could see a decent increase in graphics performance. The 4K encode/decode/scaler are a must if they want to get carrizo into 4K laptops.

Haven't thought about color compression on the APUs. Very good point.

 

[BFG10K]

3 years down the line the cards of that time will chew up the DX rendering path of today's games anyway.

But the point of Mantle is to reduce CPU overhead which means your statement about future GPU performance with DirectX is rather meaningless.

Unless you meant everyone will move to DX12 which would make Mantle irrelevant, in which case I'd agree.

Anand's review perfectly highlights the slippery slope of applications programming for specific hardware. If Mantle was truly abstracted as others have been claiming, we wouldn't see such BF4/Thief results.

Also expecting game developers to shoulder the responsibility of constantly patching their games each time AMD releases new hardware is absolutely ridiculous. That task should always fall on the driver team because it's the driver's job to program hardware directly.

I run decade old DirectX games and they get faster on each GPU I buy, and these games haven't been patched in years. That's the power of true abstraction.

 

[wand3r3r]

Has anyone seen good Memory Overclock/Underclock benchmarks on these cards? I am interested to know how much the improvements helped in that respect. Along with how it could affect APU performance.

The Tech Buyers Guru had an interesting memory overclocking article on the 7870 (GCN 1.0) but might be similar. It would be interesting to know if anything has changed with the compression stuff or if it's mainly software or enhancements in the core or elsewhere.

http://thetechbuyersguru.com/VRAMocing.php

 

[wand3r3r]

So you are saying they penalize their own buyers in a wait game?

Keep trying. I'm sure there's something negative you can find here.

Warning issued for personal attack.
-- stahlhart

 

[Keysplayr]

Keep trying. I'm sure there's something negative you can find here.

Haven't you been paying attention? That's been done already even by AMD's own fans here. Just thought you should know before attacking somebody outright.

 

[desprado]

I saw reviews of this card even on mantle this card cannot beat GTX 760 on BF4.

 

[dacostafilipe]

That task should always fall on the driver team because it's the driver's job to program hardware directly.

Yes and no.

It's the drivers job to talk with the hardware the best way possible, but it's not the drivers job to optimise the API calls. Don't forget that Mantle is a low level API and as such we want to give the control the the dev, not the driver.

Now, AMD will certainly release a new driver that will improve the performance, but if the problem lies in the change of the architecture, AMD can't do anything here.

 

[Wild Thing]

I saw reviews of this card even on mantle this card cannot beat GTX 760 on BF4.

:whiste:

Note the driver used for Mantle and D3D is a beta.
I imagine the Catalyst suite with official support for R285 will add some frames

 

[wand3r3r]

Haven't you been paying attention? That's been done already even by AMD's own fans here. Just thought you should know before attacking somebody outright.

The difference between a consumer and whatever some of the other posters are is that the consumer doesn't like being mistreated or mislead and will speak up whether it's good or bad. When you only hear one of them (per company), well you know very well...

The 285 appears to simply be AMD's way to test the new architecture while increasing margins a bit. I bet the price (the main concern I've seen) will drop in a little while.

 

[stahlhart]

Stay focused on the discussion topic and do not derail this thread with personal attacks. Last warning.
-- stahlhart

 

[Borealis7]

history tends to repeat itself, in which case the R9-290 is not so great and uses a lot of power so i would wait for the R9-485 and R9-487 which would be stellar cards at a very competitive price

 

[Keysplayr]

The 285 appears to simply be AMD's way to test the new architecture while increasing margins a bit. I bet the price (the main concern I've seen) will drop in a little while.

Simply. Ok. I may pick one up when the price lowers in a little while.

 

[RussianSensation]

I saw reviews of this card even on mantle this card cannot beat GTX 760 on BF4.

So you conveniently missed the part where on average it beats 760 by 12-15% in AT's review?

On the whole the 285 is a lot closer to the 770 than 760.

NV has no answer right now to a $200 R9 280, $240-$260 R9 280X and a $340 R9 290 and $450 R9 290X. The $180-450 desktop dGPU market is all AMD right now until 970/980 change the situation.

With 280X outperforming the 760 by 26% at 1080P, when R9 280X is going for $240-260, the 760 hardly makes sense even at $220.