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

[xthetenth]

Depends. I thought they weren't great at mining. What was it? 24MH/S @ ~110 watts? Is that worth nearly a 2X price premium when other AMD cards are readily available at normal price or discounted prices? Isn't mining about ROI? The answer isn't that simple. Yes, at $199, it's pretty attractive. At the gouging price of $380? Miners would have to do a double take on that.

It's not bad considering their expenses per hash are going to be lower. Probably not enough to come out ahead unless they think supply will be constricted.

 

[crisium]

I'll just say I could hardly be more disappointed in the power consumption, and thus, the overclocking headroom of the reference.

 

[sm625]

So after 2 years and a new 14nm process, AMD has managed to beat a 28nm 970 by about 10% in terms of performance while consuming 10% less power. This is truly a disaster for AMD. Given how much more performance a 1070 gives while using less power, it is not hard to imagine the 1060 completely stomping this thing into the dirt. They better sell as many of these turds as they can as soon as they can, because in 3 months the 1060 will be way ahead of this thing on the Steam survey. I'm surprised AMD stock isnt down 20%....

 

[IllogicalGlory]

Even I overestimated this piece of crap, but hey I got the techpowerup score spot on.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38306865&postcount=2608

To quote the same site: "it looks like AMD is fucked."

Nice work Raja.

 

[Leadbox]

Someone please tell me Vega is not at Global foundry because this could get uglier. This is assuming 14nm finfet is crap and not the Polaris design itself.

 

[Mopetar]

So after 2 years and a new 14nm process, AMD has managed to beat a 28nm 970 by about 10% in terms of performance while consuming 10% less power. This is truly a disaster for AMD. Given how much more performance a 1070 gives while using less power, it is not hard to imagine the 1060 completely stomping this thing into the dirt. They better sell as many of these turds as they can as soon as they can, because in 3 months the 1060 will be way ahead of this thing on the Steam survey. I'm surprised AMD stock isnt down 20%....

Hard to make a direct comparison since AMD is using Global Foundries. I had previously speculated the GF was having issues with the new node given that AMD was showing off working silicon in early January, but couldn't ship until the end of June.

They really need to dual source from Samsung, because the way things look right now, Vega can't possibly hope to compete if 480 is gobbling this much power.

 

[A_Skywalker]

So after 2 years and a new 14nm process, AMD has managed to beat a 28nm 970 by about 10% in terms of performance while consuming 10% less power. This is truly a disaster for AMD. Given how much more performance a 1070 gives while using less power, it is not hard to imagine the 1060 completely stomping this thing into the dirt. They better sell as many of these turds as they can as soon as they can, because in 3 months the 1060 will be way ahead of this thing on the Steam survey. I'm surprised AMD stock isnt down 20%....

Look at this for example, Nvidia is not good at dx12. More games will utilize it, I think we can even see rx480 in time close to the fps of 1070. I am unbiased about brand because all I desire is a good gpu, I dont care which company delivers it.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_r9_rx_480_8gb_review,11.html

 

[ShintaiDK]

Someone please tell me Vega is not at Global foundry because this could get uglier. This is assuming 14nm finfet is crap and not the Polaris design itself.

It is. But face reality. The GCN uarch is horrible behind as well. And its not going to improve with the R&D budget there is.

Time to move into reality and leave all the hype and fairytales behind.


Threadcrapping and trolling are not allowed
Markfw900

 

[thilanliyan]

"Meh" is all I can come up with.
I think I'll stick with my 290s.

 

[khon]

To be honest, the results are significantly worse than I expected.

Performance is meh, power draw is bad, and the noise is really bad.

 

[Azix]

If AMD failed with drivers on this launch. boy oh boy. Though I expect it shouldnt matter given its the best value at the price. But its not as hype as expected. Especially with all the dx11 benchmarks

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

So after 2 years and a new 14nm process, AMD has managed to beat a 28nm 970 by about 10% in terms of performance while consuming 10% less power. This is truly a disaster for AMD

Those two card are a tier apart. Maybe a tier and a half, given that the 970 was positioned against the 390X. The 960 and 280 cards are the baseline for performance and efficiency gains for the the RX480. But hey, by all means keep on comparing apples to melons, if that's your thing.

 

[realibrad]

To be honest, the results are significantly worse than I expected.

Performance is meh, power draw is bad, and the noise is really bad.

How is the noise really bad? In what way?

 

[crisium]

Let's play find the bottleneck?

http://techreport.com/review/30328/amd-radeon-rx-480-graphics-card-reviewed/5

Also interesting to see the memory compression. The 480 loses in both GB/s tests here to Maxwell 980 (one outright, the other when adjusting for 480 having 1/7 more bandwidth). It also has 40% more bandwidth then the 380X but slightly more than 40% higher GB/s tests. At least some progress, if nothing spectacular.

 

[khon]

How is the noise really bad? In what way?

From Techpowerup.com:

"What's even worse than the heat is the terrible fan noise. While idle noise is fine with 29 dBA (an idle-fan-off feature would still have been nice), in gaming the fan ramps up a lot, emitting 41 dBA noise during gaming (not Furmark). This makes the RX 480 the loudest card launched in recent history, much noisier than for example GTX 1080 (which is almost twice as fast).

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/29.html

 

[xthetenth]

I'll just say I could hardly be more disappointed in the power consumption, and thus, the overclocking headroom of the reference.

Yeah. The power consumption is just not pretty. Yikes. It's a reasonable price/performance part, but for AMD's sake it really needs to be a hot clocked mobile oriented design that's optimal at lower clock speeds and/or have been let down by GF. The latter would kind of make some sense with their strategy because that lets them make their cheap chips cheap. Was hoping for a possible bus-powered 470 though and I don't think that's happening.

 

[zebrax2]

Really disappointing. While the performance I guess OK and the power consumption did drop a lot compared to 390 the average performance per watt is nowhere near the "up to 2.8x" that was claimed.

 

[khon]

Really disappointing. While the performance is i guess OK and the power consumption did drop a lot compared to 390 the average performance per watt is nowhere near the "up to 2.8x" that was claimed.

Yeah the power consumption is actually higher than the 1070, even though the 1070 is ~50% faster ...

I am not impressed at all, so I just sold my AMD stocks, did make a nice profit though, which I will not use to buy an NVIDIA card

 

[linkgoron]

The performance is great for the price.

The power usage and noise according to TPU are disappointing, although perf/watt is better than the 970, it losses to the 980.

While I hope AIBs will be better, it looks like either GF or AMD just did not deliver. I was expecting about the same performance, but with significantly lower power usage (around 30% less). Vega has to fix whatever fundamental issues AMD has, as otherwise it won't be very competitive, at least not in a very close power envelope.

 

[HannooFX]

Disappointing indeed, power consumption is terrible:thumbsdown:

 

[Stuka87]

As I said in the other thread, performance is pretty much exactly what I suspected, although it jumps around some, so maybe some driver improvements are needed.

But the power consumption is definitely higher than I expected. Its basically using all available power and is being power limited. Which may explain the power jumping around actually.

 

[Triloby]

Seriously....?

This is the best AMD can do on a 14nm node shrinkage?

This does not give me any hope for Vega AT ALL. Now I'm just waiting for the GTX 1060 to outdo this card. Disappointing.

 

[Silverforce11]

Seems a ton of variation from different reviews.

Digital Foundry's video side-by-side review shows it beating 390 by 10% and 970 by 15% or so, with lower power usage than the 970.

Computerbase also found decent perf, okay OC perf gains 55 FPS to 64 FPS etc.

Still, that power usage is disgusting for 14nm FF. And the ref is running right at the limits of the PCB, with 1x 6pin. Combined with the thermal limits, there's no room to OC.

But for the price... there's nothing better until the 1060. It's the only reason I bought 2. It's cheaper than current 970/390 by ~$60 here in Australia, cheaper than a GTX 980 by $200 and almost half the price of a 1070.

 

[richaron]

Like the rest of you, I was hoping for more.

Anyone with a realistic grasp of history and DX12 will expect these to increase, but still...

 

[Azix]

Yeah the power consumption is actually higher than the 1070, even though the 1070 is ~50% faster ...

I am not impressed at all, so I just sold my AMD stocks, did make a nice profit though, which I will not use to buy an NVIDIA card

This is not unexpected. The 1070 still lacks a hardware scheduler and other hardware that AMD seems to have retained. I hope they at least dropped DP some more, but maybe they have a reason to keep it relatively high.

its also possible their power saving features aren't working quite right yet on the current drivers.

But it destroys the per dollar charts anyone under a 390 or looking to save on power would be happy.

Seriously....?

This is the best AMD can do on a 14nm node shrinkage?

This does not give me any hope for Vega AT ALL. Now I'm just waiting for the GTX 1060 to outdo this card. Disappointing.

1060 might. Nvidia has the benefit of going second but if the hardware can't manage it then it could get ugly.