Official AMD Polaris Review Thread: Radeon RX 480, RX 470, and RX 460

[OatisCampbell]

Over two years ago I bought a custom cooled 290 with 5 free games for $250.. According to the Techpowerup review of the GTX1080, that card is still as powerful as a GTX970.

Now in June 2016, AMDs first product on their new 14nm finfet is an over $200 card that performs about the same as a GTX970...and my over two year old 290.....



Wake me when somebody is selling a card that is a. in stock more than 5 seconds b. gives me a performance upgrade at my $250-$300 pricepoint.

 

[Mercennarius]

Over two years ago I bought a custom cooled 290 with 5 free games for $250.. According to the Techpowerup review of the GTX1080, that card is still as powerful as a GTX970.

Now in June 2016, AMDs first product on their new 14nm finfet is an over $200 card that performs about the same as a GTX970...and my over two year old 290.....



Wake me when somebody is selling a card that is a. in stock more than 5 seconds b. gives me a performance upgrade at my $250-$300 pricepoint.

Wait a few months for the RX 490, will launch around the $300-$350 price point and crush your 290 in performance. The 480 is for those upgrading over a 280/380 GPU or those that want to run crossfire and have 1080 performance at $400.

 

[PhonakV30]

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...-Promise/PC-Perspective-Advanced-Power-Testin

Comparing the RX 480 to the R9 390 and the GTX 970, it's most direct performance competitors, its clear that Polaris is a more efficient architecture than Hawaii and Maxwell. Based on these results, the RX 480 is 1.7x more power efficient than its last generation products and as much as 50% more efficient than the GTX 970.

so AMD didn't lie about Up to 1.7X but about 2.8x dunno where they got.

 

[boozzer]

I am strongly considering Crossfire is my reasoning, something I don't want to try with the 390x. My thought was maybe get one of these lessor 480s today to play with, then get a AIB one later that has better cooling and let the AIB one be my primary card at that point (so it's overclocked self could do well in non-Crossfire games).

Is the backplate worth ANYTHING? I see a $10 gap for XFX version vs Sapphire and that seems to be the key difference. Is one better for a warranty than the other?

alot of games got bad crossfire or sli support unless you know dx12 games all got native support for multi gpu.

I personally would never go for crossfire or sli. if you need 1070/1080 lvl performance, go for that.

 

[Ranulf]

Yeap, now that 480 doesnt live up to the efficiency claims, we are going back to "power consumption doesn't matter".

< Boggle. >

 

[Yakk]

As the owner of 5, count em, 5 melted PSU cables from the R9 290 8+6 pin debacle I would highly recommend you go with no less than 8+6 pin for the 480.

If I were less lucky I might have burned to death in the fire those would have absolutely caused.

Wow, I've never seen that and I've had a few cards. But I hear you and I never skimp on a PSU or its cables. I don't push it as hard as I used to, but I still run a 1300w evga G2 psu (single rail beast of a PSU I have say) I kept from my mining days, not really worried about power usage LOL...

 

[xthetenth]

...are people really freaking out over 40 watts? This must be some kind of joke.

It performs exactly as expected -- roughly 390/GTX 970 levels. It costs $199. People need to take a moment to let that sink in. The fact of the matter is that this card currently has THE BEST perf/$ on the market. Period.

All the people spazzing out: Would you really be throwing confetti and praise on this card if it consumed 110 watts as opposed to 150 watts? Please.

Christ, I have an Nvidia GPU and even I'm surprised at how disappointed everyone here is.

Most of us are interested in the higher segments, so a lot of interest is going to how much performance they can cram into 300W.

Hopefully the cause is GloFo making incontinent transistors and they'll have better chips on TSMC so I can finally get a good chip under that sexy sexy Fury X cooler.

 

[SPBHM]

I would you CF 480s when you can buy and OC a 1070?

 

[96Firebird]

Is the backplate worth ANYTHING? I see a $10 gap for XFX version vs Sapphire and that seems to be the key difference. Is one better for a warranty than the other?

XFX has an overclocked reference cooler card out there, it might be that one. Last I checked that was $270 on Newegg though.

 

[Mercennarius]

I would you CF 480s when you can buy and OC a 1070?

Because you can buy two 480s for $400, and out perform an OCed 1070 for less money.

 

[SPBHM]

Because you can buy two 480s for $400, and out perform an OCed 1070 for less money.

good luck outperforming the 1070 OC on the latest games with no CF support

and check this

1070 OC = 139.7FPS
380X 8GB CF = 140.7FPS
on an old DX11 game where CF should work at its best
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/5.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1070_Gaming_X/27.html

when performance and price are this close with multi vs single GPU, you really don't want multi GPU...

 

[Mercennarius]

good luck outperforming the 1070 OC on the latest games with no CF support

In those cases, the 1070 is the better option. But if the only game(s) you care about or benchmarks you are trying to run support crossfire than the 480s are the better option.

But again, AMDs 1070 competitor is the upcoming 490 not the 480.

 

[felix5]

..

 

[Janooo]

Over two years ago I bought a custom cooled 290 with 5 free games for $250.. According to the Techpowerup review of the GTX1080, that card is still as powerful as a GTX970.

Now in June 2016, AMDs first product on their new 14nm finfet is an over $200 card that performs about the same as a GTX970...and my over two year old 290.....



Wake me when somebody is selling a card that is a. in stock more than 5 seconds b. gives me a performance upgrade at my $250-$300 pricepoint.

Not really. RX480 is about 30% faster than 970 in DX12.

Moving on to DX12 and we see AMD’s new architecture really coming into its own against the NVIDIA cards. It absolutely demolishes the GTX 970 across the board (even in NVIDIA-friendly games like Tomb Raider) and even manages to run circles around that once-expensive GTX 980. These tests show Maxwell’s performance in current DX12 applications is nothing short of embarrassing and proves this architecture simply wasn’t designed with these types of workloads in mind.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...9-radeon-rx480-8gb-performance-review-24.html

 

[HiroThreading]

Yeap, now that 480 doesnt live up to the efficiency claims, we are going back to "power consumption doesn't matter".

When AMD led the perf/watt charts with RV770, Evergreen, Cayman and Tahiti, the only thing people were concerned about was absolute performance or perf/$. Remember how much of a trashing the HD 7970 received because of its price?

Now, however, nope it's all about perf/watt.

 

[Headfoot]

290/290X and 970 are the three cards that really put a damper on the 480 release. It really does appear that GF 14nm blows. Power efficiency should be much higher and really makes me think we'll see poor overclocking headroom with AIB cards and skyrocketing power consumption.

I was hoping to replace my 780 with an AIB 480, and now I'm questioning that decision. Idle power consumption isn't any better on the 480, load power consumption is slightly better, it's slightly faster overall, pretty meh. I was hoping to see more out of a node shrink. NVIDIA worked magic with their node shrink to 16nm with crazy high clocks and decent power efficiency.

You're comparing to the 7850 successor. 400+mm2 die vs 232mm2 die. Different product class. The 1070 is closest to your real product class, but even then its still smaller 300mm2 class die vs 400mm2 class die. The real GK110/GM200 successor is yet to arrive

 

[boozzer]

Seems a bit loud especially under load. Will wait for quieter models to be released.

We need more Freesync/Gsync 144hz monitors. There are currently none that are 24" which would be good to pair up with these newer budget cards.

it isn't loud if you don't oc with the reference cooler.

want OC? get AIB.

 

[Headfoot]

Not even 150, it is 165. Yes I would be throwing confetti, if it was consuming 110W instead of 165W. Because 110W @ 232 implies Vega scaling of 250W @ 512 mm^2 @ around 1.25GHz. Instead, now we're looking at 320W @ 512 mm^2. Which means Vega is going to clock lower and its basically going to be garbage. Vega will barely beat 1080 in performance while consuming 30% more power, and there will be no answer at all to 1080ti. All of this is basically confirmed today.

What?

Vega is not on GF's process. Vega doesn't use high frequency GDDR. We don't know what other tricks are in store on a future GPU...

 

[Bacon1]

Techpowerup, so far the only CFX testing I've seen is very odd.

They test Hitman in DX11 not DX12, yet test Rise of the Tomb Raider in DX12 which removes the (almost 100% scaling) it has in DX11, while also being slower than DX11 in general for all cards.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/13.html

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/16.html

They used to be very good, but they just lost my respect with that testing.

 

[Headfoot]

I think they should have positioned it at $179 and it would have been a much better card. I'm pretty disappointed myself as this was going to my upgrade from my aging GTX 670 FTW. My bday is coming up soon and I told the wifey GTX 1070 or bust.

The 480 would be a massive upgrade over your 670. Obviously the 1070 will be faster but at over double the price.

I can't possibly fathom how your disappointment in the difference between $199 and $179 results in you buying a $450 card instead.

 

[Zstream]

Techpowerup, so far the only CFX testing I've seen is very odd.

They test Hitman in DX11 not DX12, yet test Rise of the Tomb Raider in DX12 which removes the (almost 100% scaling) it has in DX11, while also being slower than DX11 in general for all cards.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/13.html

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/16.html

They used to be very good, but they just lost my respect with that testing.

Weird... That seems odd.

 

[Headfoot]

Let's sum up this thread:

People with team alliances, spinning to make any molehill they can find into a mountain.

And in the real world, people buy $200 GPUs and this is much faster than what $200 would buy you yesterday.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I'm going to attempt to generalize this thread.

Some of us a happy with 80fps and $150-$250 money in our pockets
Others want 140fps

If you're the second guy this card is not for you

 

[96Firebird]

The 480 would be a massive upgrade over your 670. Obviously the 1070 will be faster but at over double the price.

How is the 1070 "over double the price" of the 480?

 

[kawi6rr]

Anybody who's read an AMD graphics card launch review knows to wait for the AIB boards. Nothing new here not sure why the forum is "Soooo disappointed" with the review when we all know its a reference card.

Just seems silly!!