[Rumor (Various)] AMD R7/9 3xx / Fiji / Fury

[Lepton87]

The 390/390X are probably just cards to fill a void in AMD's product lineup and a hold over until a node change next year. I think the Fiji pro will be the card to lookout for - hopefully the pricing is not too outrageous.

It's also interesting to think about how more VRAM on the upper mid range parts actually makes sense - though we will never admit it - because the people buying the very high end cards dump them in 6 months for the next card, but the people buying the middle of the road cards are probably more value oriented and hold on to them for a generation or two, making the extra (8GB) of vram actually worthwhile. 8GB of HBM would be nice, but I don't think we're going to see it. I think the Fiji XT with 4GB of VRAM will be a fast high end GPU, but be a bit of a quirky product in a year or two from now if and when it starts to run into VRAM limitations.

In a year or two when NV releases its new 14nm GPU the 980Ti with its 6GB of VRAM(not to mention 12GBs of the titan X) could be even worse off and that is what I expect. Look at the Titan with its 6GB of ram. It was supposed to be future-proof but look at it now. Giving enough RAM is not enough to keep your GPU relevant, if you are not going to optimize your drivers then it is a waste. What happened to the performance of the Kepler is what is keeping me from buying the 980Ti. I think it's planned obsolesce and I can't support that.

 

[bryanW1995]

Red Team Plus exists.
But I don't think they are paid trolls.

https://twitter.com/amandablain

That one looks nothing at all like a troll...

"Hm! *looks at no crossfire bridges just like on 290/x* Can't be crossfired!" Figures.

This guy should at the very least be able to put the card through 3dmark. I think I'm hoping too much out of him, in fact.

3dmark 07 maybe.

 

[el etro]

First the Hawaii bashing, now the same bashing Fiji is suffering...

 

[bryanW1995]

I think that 2500K deserves better! Its like your 2500k and GTX 480 were a young married couple. One stayed fit and ate healthy, the other smoked and drank heavily. The 2500k is ready to get back out there and meet a new video card. Still has tons of life left in it!

I lol'd at that.

Yeah...maybe I'll introduce it to my 7970, then use the open space in my main rig to install something faster. You know, b/c civ5 and D3 are super stressful on gpus and require all the horsepower I can get.

 

[TechyGeek]

They haven't done anything with 300 series. They had almost 2 years and what'd they do? respin silicon to get TDP down, slap another 4gb and added maybe 7% clock? These can be done in 6-9 months. what have they been doing for the remaining year? I was hoping for at least hdmi 2.0

 

[bryanW1995]

They haven't done anything with 300 series. They had almost 2 years and what'd they do? respin silicon to get TDP down, slap another 4gb and added maybe 7% clock? These can be done in 6-9 months. what have they been doing for the remaining year? I was hoping for at least hdmi 2.0

Read the rest of the thread...Fury Pro and Fury XT are going to be above 390 and 390x.

 

[Headfoot]

They haven't done anything with 300 series. They had almost 2 years and what'd they do? respin silicon to get TDP down, slap another 4gb and added maybe 7% clock? These can be done in 6-9 months. what have they been doing for the remaining year? I was hoping for at least hdmi 2.0

Theres no confirmation they haven't updated it further. Its all speculation

 

[monstercameron]

They haven't done anything with 300 series. They had almost 2 years and what'd they do? respin silicon to get TDP down, slap another 4gb and added maybe 7% clock? These can be done in 6-9 months. what have they been doing for the remaining year? I was hoping for at least hdmi 2.0

Upping their marketing and software game, developing new memory standards, developing new CPUs etc. tonnes of stuff moving in the background that we will never see.

 

[ocre]

In a year or two when NV releases its new 14nm GPU the 980Ti with its 6GB of VRAM(not to mention 12GBs of the titan X) could be even worse off and that is what I expect. Look at the Titan with its 6GB of ram. It was supposed to be future-proof but look at it now. Giving enough RAM is not enough to keep your GPU relevant, if you are not going to optimize your drivers then it is a waste. What happened to the performance of the Kepler is what is keeping me from buying the 980Ti. I think it's planned obsolesce and I can't support that.

Seems like every 3 or 4 post someone is posting about Kepler and the new phrase of the day "Kepler syndrome"

Couldn't this stuff be talked about in another thread? Off topic conspiracies about nvidia surely don't have a place in the Fiji/300 series thread

Now I will make a comment a little more towards the topic.
Regardless of your conspiracy, you would be much better off seeing what AMD has to offer. No way I would buy a 980ti right now.

 

[railven]

I can't believe you'd even consider NV this round after what happened to Kepler, and you do have a 680 and a 780 (I am sure that 780 Lightning wasn't cheap), both cards that get beaten by their respective competitors the 280X/7970 and the R9 290. If I was a previous Kepler owner during the last 3 years, I would not buy an NV card this round and teach them a lesson for 1 generation. Throwing Kepler under the bus was even worse than the 970 fiasco since at least 970 remains a good card. 780/780Ti/OG Titan and esp. 680 2GB are all complete write-offs today and look laughable in terms of their performance considering their launch prices, compared to 280X/7970Ghz and $220-270 R9 290/290X cards. $700 780Ti is slower than a $270 R9 290X just 1.5 years later. JHH is probably laughing at all the Kepler owners who are pressing F5 to upgrade their 780Ti to Maxwell cuz how much of a dump that card takes in modern titles.

THat's only if you look at newer games, though. For the primary games I still play every day, my card isn't showing it's age. But face it, Nvidia has already got a strong hold on devrel and buying an AMD card is just as big a risk of obsolescence as buying an Nvidia card.

Don't forgot just how bad the AMD cards do in those Nvidia sponsored games, perhaps just as bad as previous NV hardware did.

I bought the GTX 780 for $450 (after taxes+shipping) when R9 290's were going for $600+. I felt I got a great deal.

You tell me to "show it to nvidia" by skipping them but at the same time I skipped AMD because of their atrocious decision to use that stock cooler on their card. (and then the bit mining craze which wasn't their fault).

Anyways, I go where my dollar gets me the most performance at the moment not 1.5-2 years later. You use current AMD prices against Nvidia launch prices a tad deceptively. My 7970 cost me more than the GTX 680 I bought the girlfriend. And my Lighting cost me less than either, too.

 

[thilanliyan]

https://twitter.com/amandablain

That one looks nothing at all like a troll...

Would love me some troll on troll action.

 

[JDG1980]

For what it's worth, both Videocardz and WCCFTech seem sure that the 208W TDP for the R9 390/390X listed in the MSI slides is incorrect. Their justification is another slide, of uncertain provenance, which appears to show the reference R9 290X from MSI with the same 208W TDP. I did a bit of googling around and also found a PDF on the official Club3D website which shows the reference R9 290X with a "Consumption Maximum load" of 208W, which we know to be incorrect. If the R9 390/390X is indeed no more efficient than its predecessors, that's very bad news and it indicates that AMD hasn't done any real work at all on anything except Fiji.

The MSI slides on the R9 380 are a bit more encouraging. At least they seem to have gotten the power consumption down to 150W, though this doesn't necessarily indicate a respin - we know it could be done with improved binning, since the FirePro W9100 and the R9 M295X both run at this wattage or lower. What's not clear to me is why MSI decided to include two 6-pin connectors, when one should have been enough. Perhaps they just reused their R9 285 board design.

I suspected that the R7 370 would be a cut-down Pitcairn, and fortunately the MSI slides seem to indicate that this is wrong. (This means, ironically enough, that the R7 370 at retail will be a better card than the OEM R9 370, though one would expect the opposite to be true based on AMD's numbering scheme.) However, it looks like this card is a straight rebadge with no improvements. The TDP is the same as on the existing R9 270, and the clock speed is only marginally higher, which could easily have been done through improved binning and/or tinkering with the voltage. (Pitcairn is way overvolted by default on the existing cards.) We know it's still using the GCN 1.0 architecture, because the PCB shot clearly displays the CrossFire fingers.

The R7 260, in my opinion, makes no sense as a retail card and should have been OEM-only. First of all, unlike the OEM version, this one requires a 6-pin power connector, which obviates about the only scenario where this would make sense to buy over a R7 270. Secondly, if the rumored $109 price is correct, it's not at all competitive. You can get a 2GB GTX 750 for $99 after rebate, and that beats this cut-down Bonaire rebrand in all metrics: better performance, cheaper, and lower power usage.

Overall, not impressed.

 

[therealnickdanger]

The market will very quickly determine if AMD's pricing is appropriate in the next few weeks.

 

[Head1985]

For what it's worth, both Videocardz and WCCFTech seem sure that the 208W TDP for the R9 390/390X listed in the MSI slides is incorrect. Their justification is another slide, of uncertain provenance, which appears to show the reference R9 290X from MSI with the same 208W TDP. I did a bit of googling around and also found a PDF on the official Club3D website which shows the reference R9 290X with a "Consumption Maximum load" of 208W, which we know to be incorrect. If the R9 390/390X is indeed no more efficient than its predecessors, that's very bad news and it indicates that AMD hasn't done any real work at all on anything except Fiji.
Overall, not impressed.

I think both videocardz and wccftech dont know anything about grenada.They both was surprised about r9 390x core count.
one saying 208w mean 280w and another 208w is normal for MSI 290x/390x gaming OC card at 1100mhz with 8GB Vram at 6100mhz.
We already know that MSI 290x gaming have listed 250w
http://www.msi.com/product/vga/R9-290X-GAMING-4G.html#hero-specification

Lets wait some more days...They really dont know anything.

 

[JDG1980]

If you look closely at the R7 370 board shot, you can see that the chip is still "MADE IN TAIWAN". This means it's still a TSMC product. So Pitcairn, at least, was not ported to Global Foundries.

The R9 380 board shot, unfortunately, has no identifying marks of any kind on the die or package. The capacitor layout on the package, though, matches the existing Tonga chip's layout exactly. I did some measurements based on the length of the PCIe connector, comparing the die size on the Sapphire R9 285 pictured here to that on the MSI R9 380 on the leaked slide. In both cases, I found a die size of ~368 sq. mm. It's looking unlikely that any actual changes were made to Tonga, though a new stepping (metal layer respin) is not out of the question.

We can't tell for the R9 390/390X cards because these don't have any PCB shots shown in the leaked data. But at this point, I'm skeptical we will see any actual new features on any of these. It's only a "refresh" in the same way that Kaveri->Godavari was a refresh. Same product, maybe marginally better binning (or maybe not, given the way that AMD shot enough volts through Godavari to shock a rhino).

 

[xthetenth]

Seems like every 3 or 4 post someone is posting about Kepler and the new phrase of the day "Kepler syndrome"

Which is weird because I've made the joke before.

 

[Grooveriding]

Videocardz and wccf throw darts and hope for the best most of the time. I'll never forget wccf photoshopping a gtx280 die on a picture of a PCB and calling it the first look at Fermi. lol

Anyone can just fart a rumour at them and they'll post it up.

 

[x3sphere]

Based on what some media types have said, I'm expecting the 300 series to be nothing other than a straight rebrand unfortunately.

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-shows-radeon-r9-300-series-cards-to-red-team-plus_165838

https://twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/609437983134089216 (didn't mention AMD specifically, but you can tell he was referring to them...)

It seems no review samples are out there, that's really not a good sign.

 

[flopper]

Based on what some media types have said, I'm expecting the 300 series to be nothing other than a straight rebrand unfortunately.

no.

 

[TaintedSquirrel]

Expensive rebrands...

http://i.imgur.com/6aGGKLm.jpg

 

[railven]

Based on what some media types have said, I'm expecting the 300 series to be nothing other than a straight rebrand unfortunately.

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-shows-radeon-r9-300-series-cards-to-red-team-plus_165838

https://twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/609437983134089216 (didn't mention AMD specifically, but you can tell he was referring to them...)

It seems no review samples are out there, that's really not a good sign.

To some degree, I sort of agree:

We are glad to see AMD supporting the end users, but it is unusual to see the traditional hardware sites and media not briefed this close to new product launch. In the past when traditional hardware reviewers aren’t given a product with enough time to properly test it there is usually a reason for doing so.

But, I get the feeling AMD is probably cutting out the middle man the same way it seems the gaming industry is doing the same. This year for the first time at E3, fans are getting direct invites. EDIT: Let me add, by fans I mean popular social media personalities.

Not sure if it's showing up in tech sites, but for gaming at least there seems to be a strong dislike of the traditional journalism/review sites. And the industry is responding.

The quote above sounds as much as sour grapes as it does probable of bad news. The AMD fan in me leans towards sour grapes, the realist towards bad news.

 

[Despoiler]

Expensive rebrands...

http://i.imgur.com/6aGGKLm.jpg

BB prices are higher than everyone else.

Where is the confirmation on rebrands again?

Back to r/hardware with you.

 

[JDG1980]

I checked my local Best Buy this evening and they did not have any 300 series cards in stock. There's another one in my area; I'll stop by tomorrow and see what they have, since it looks like a couple of these stores may have them on the shelves already. There's a 15-day return policy, so I could always test the card to figure out the truth about power consumption and then return it.

 

[Skurge]

Based on what some media types have said, I'm expecting the 300 series to be nothing other than a straight rebrand unfortunately.

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-shows-radeon-r9-300-series-cards-to-red-team-plus_165838

https://twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/609437983134089216 (didn't mention AMD specifically, but you can tell he was referring to them...)

It seems no review samples are out there, that's really not a good sign.

Seems to me like they are just butthurt they weren't shipped to an island like last year's GPU14 launch.

 

[Enigmoid]

Remember the 200 series? When a 7950 went for $170 and the 280 brought the price back up.