AMD Launches Retail Radeon 300 Series: A Prelude To Fury
by Ryan Smith on June 18, 2015 10:35 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 300
Radeon R9 390 Series: Return To Hawaii
Last but not least among the numbered 300 series stack are the top two cards and the only cards not to exist in some form in the OEM lineup, the R9 390 and R9 390X. These two cards are based on AMD’s Hawaii GPU, previously used for the R9 290 series, and of all of the cards in this refresh, these cards may very well attract the most interest for a couple of different reasons.
The first reason is simply because as AMD’s former flagship GPU, it was Hawaii and the 290 series that took the brunt of the blow from the launch of NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 architecture launch in 2014. NVIDIA undercut AMD on price while beating them at performance and acoustics, which put AMD in a difficult situation. And since AMD is not replacing Hawaii with another chip at this performance level any time soon, this means that Hawaii is what AMD has available to throw at the sub-Fury market.
Meanwhile the other factor at play here is that AMD significantly cut 290 series prices in the months since the Maxwell 2 launch to recover from the situation and improve the competitive positioning of the products since they lacked the performance edge. This led to prices around $319 and $249 for the R9 290X and R9 290 as recently as the GTX 980 Ti launch, for example. However with the 300 series, AMD now wants to get card prices up to $429 and $329 respectively, which means that AMD needs to be able to do something special to justify a price hike of $100. Short of RAM and NAND flash memory, where cyclical commodity pressure leads to gluts and shortages of supplies, driving up the cost of existing computer components is very difficult to do, so how AMD is going to achieve this is of great interest.
Anyhow, without further ado, let’s take a look at AMD’s plans for the R9 390 series.
AMD R9 390 Series (Hawaii) Specification Comparison | ||||||
AMD Radeon R9 390X | AMD Radeon R9 390 | AMD Radeon R9 290X | AMD Radeon R9 290 | |||
Stream Processors | 2816 | 2560 | 2816 | 2560 | ||
Texture Units | 176 | 160 | 176 | 160 | ||
ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | ||
Core Clock | ? | ? | 727MHz | 662MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1050MHz | 1000MHz | 1000MHz | 947MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 6Gbps GDDR5 | 6Gbps GDDR5 | 5Gbps GDDR5 | 5Gbps GDDR5 | ||
Memory Bus Width | 512-bit | 512-bit | 512-bit | 512-bit | ||
VRAM | 8GB | 8GB | 4GB | 4GB | ||
FP64 | 1/8 | 1/8 | 1/8 | 1/8 | ||
TrueAudio | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
Transistor Count | 6.2B | 6.2B | 6.2B | 6.2B | ||
Typical Board Power | 275W | 275W | 250W | 250W | ||
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | ||
Architecture | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.1 | ||
GPU | Hawaii | Hawaii | Hawaii | Hawaii | ||
Launch Date | 06/18/15 | 06/18/15 | 10/24/13 | 11/05/13 | ||
Launch Price | $429 | $329 | $549 | $399 |
As with the 290 series, the 390 series is split between two cards, with the difference coming down to clockspeeds and the number of CUs enabled. R9 390X and R9 390 are direct successors to R9 290 and R9 290X in this respect, with the former being a higher clocked part with all 44 CUs (2816 SPs) enabled, while the latter is lower clocked with 40 CUs (2560 SPs) enabled.
The biggest change from a specifications perspective is that AMD has cranked up both the GPU and memory clockspeeds in order to further improve performance. With partners already regularly offering higher-end factory overclocked cards with boost clockspeeds at 1050MHz (or more) for the R9 290X, AMD has essentially crafted a new SKU from this mark for the 390X. Meanwhile the R9 390 sees its boost clockspeed go from 947MHz to a flat 1000MHz, a slightly larger bump up in clockspeeds on both an absolute and relative basis.
More surprising is the fact that AMD has increased the memory clockspeeds from 5Gbps to 6Gbps, a full 1Gbps (20%) increase in memory clockspeeds. As you may recall from our R9 290X review, one of the architectural decisions made with Hawaii was to build its memory controllers wider and slower in order to make more efficient use of die space and to keep power consumption in check. The end result was a rather large 512-bit memory bus running at a slower 5Gbps, while on the chip itself Hawaii’s memory controller was smaller than Tahiti’s thanks to the lower memory clockspeed.
Consequently pushing 6Gbps is a surprising move from AMD. Since Hawaii’s memory controllers were not designed to be high clocking, AMD is certainly squeezing out everything they can from Hawaii in the process. The end result however is that AMD now has 20% more memory bandwidth to play with, for a total of 384GB/sec. This is more memory bandwidth than any other GDDR5 card in existence, and in memory bandwidth bottlenecked scenarios, this will definitely be to AMD’s advantage.
Speaking of memory, for the 390 series AMD has also made 8GB configurations the baseline for the series, whereas on the 290 series it was an optional value added feature for board partners. While one could write a small tome on the matter of memory capacity, especially in light of the fact that the Fury series only has 4GB of memory, ultimately the fact that the 390 series has 8GB now is due to a couple of factors. The first of which is the fact that 4GB Hawaii cards require 2Gb GDDR5 chips (2x16), a capacity that is slowly going away in favor of the 4Gb chips used on the Playstation 4 and many of the 2015 video cards. The other reason is that it allows AMD to exploit NVIDIA’s traditional stinginess with VRAM; just as with the 290 series versus the GTX 780/770, this means AMD once again has a memory capacity advantage, which helps to shore up the value of their cards versus what NVIDIA offers at the same price.
Meanwhile with the above in mind, based on comments from AMD product managers, it sounds like the use of 4Gb chips also plays a part in the memory clockspeed increases we’re seeing on the 390 series. Later generation chips don’t just get bigger, but they get faster and operate at lower voltages as well, and from what we’ve seen it looks like AMD is taking advantage of all of these factors.
Top: R9 Fury X. Bottom: R9 390X/290X
Moving on, let’s talk about power consumption. Both of the 390 series cards have been labeled with a typical board power of 275W. The fact that AMD is actually publishing a number this time around is a welcome change – the TBP for the 290 series wasn't originally published – but absent a review sample this also makes it hard to compare these cards to the 290 series. AMD’s guidance essentially suggests that total power consumption hasn’t come down at all (though perf-per-watt should have gone up), and in fact power consumption may be slightly up. Meanwhile this also happens to be identical to Fury X’s TBP, to give you an idea of how the 390 series compares to the Fury series.
In any case, this guidance gives us little reason to expect that 390’s per-per-watt situation is significantly improved from the 290 series. Consequently, expect to see AMD focus on producing a powerful card and selling it for a good price, as those are the best attributes that AMD can use to promote the 390 series and card sales.
Pricing on the other hand is going to be a mixed bag depending on which direction you’re looking from. As we mentioned a bit ago, AMD’s MSRPs for the 390 series is $329 for the R9 390 and $429 for the R9 390X. These prices essentially put the 390 cards in competition with the GTX 970 and GTX 980, with the R9 390 lining up perfectly with the former, and the R9 390X undercutting the latter by some $70. With the 290 series on the other hand AMD essentially had to price the 290X at GTX 970 levels and the 290 below that, so these 390 series prices represent a significant increase over the 290 series.
Ultimately AMD is banking on the improved performance of the 390 series to justify these higher price tags and allow them to recover on margins. Unfortunately we don’t have any review samples at this time, but if the performance is right then this would be a significant coup for AMD, as it would improve their situation and at the same time put significant new pressure on NVIDIA, which is the kind of situation that AMD thrives in.
One thing AMD won’t have to worry about is the card design situation. With the 290 series AMD shot themselves in the foot with an underperforming reference cooler, and although the underlying chip hasn’t really changed from 290 to 390, leaving card designs entirely in the hands of their partners means that AMD shouldn’t have a repeat of that aspect of the 290 series launch. All of the air-cooled 390 designs will be open air coolers with 2 or 3 fans, and usually the same designs as partners already used for their 290 series cards. Open air coolers do not solve the heat dissipation problem on their own – that 275W of heat needs to go somewhere – but at the very least for AMD it’s going to make for a quieter situation.
Last but certainly not least however, we want to talk a bit more about the performance optimizations AMD has been working on for the 390 series. While we’re still tracking down more details on just what changes AMD has made, AMD had told us that there are a number of small changes from the 290 series to the 390 series that should improve performance by several percent on a clock-for-clock, apples-to-apples basis. That means along with the 20% memory clockspeed increase and 5% GPU clockspeed increase, we should see further performance improvements from these lower-level changes, which is also why we can’t just overclock a 290X and call it a 390X.
So what are those changes? From our discussions with AMD, we have been told that the clock-for-clock performance gains comes from a multitude of small factors, things the company has learned from and been able to optimize for over the last 2 years. AMD did not name all of those factors, but there were a couple of optimizations in particular that were pointed out.
The first optimization is that AMD has gone back and refined their process for identifying the operating voltages of Hawaii chips, with the net outcome being that Hawaii voltages should be down a hair, reducing power and/or thermal throttling. The second optimization mentioned is that the 4Gb GDDR5 chips being used offer better timings than the 2Gb chips, which can depending on the timings improve various aspects of memory performance. Most likely AMD has reinvested these timing gains into improving the memory clockspeeds, but until we get our hands on a 390X card we won’t know for sure.
Shifting gears for a moment to marketing/promotion, expect to see AMD promote the 390 series on the basis of 4K gaming and VR. As far as VR goes there’s a good reason for this, as the R9 290 was the AMD card used in the Oculus Rift recommended hardware specification. So as long as developers stick to Oculus’s recommendations, then the 390 series will deliver the full performance necessary for VR gaming. Meanwhile for 4K gaming, the fact that AMD is promoting the 390 series for 4K is largely a rehash of AMD’s marketing angle from the 290 series, and not unlike the 380, I believe AMD is overshooting, especially as the Fury X should be a far better card for 4K gaming. But we’ll have to see what the performance numbers are like with retail cards.
Finally, to wrap things up we have our standard price comparison table below. Overall, while not every AMD card perfectly maps to an existing NVIDIA card, for the most part AMD is aiming the 300 series to go directly against the bulk of NVIDIA’s 900 series lineup. With the exception of the R9 390X AMD is not attempting to significantly undercut NVIDIA’s pricing, so it will be interesting to see if the performance of these refreshed cards is high enough to give the 300 series the competitive footing it needs. Otherwise AMD will need to deal with the spoiler effect of the 200 series, especially the R9 290X and R9 290.
Summer 2015 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
Radeon R9 Fury X | $649 | GeForce GTX 980 Ti | |||
$499 | GeForce GTX 980 | ||||
Radeon R9 390X | $429 | ||||
Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 390 |
$329 | GeForce GTX 970 | |||
Radeon R9 290 | $250 | ||||
Radeon R9 380 | $200 | GeFroce GTX 960 | |||
Radeon R7 370 Radeon R9 270 |
$150 | ||||
$130 | GeForce GTX 750 Ti | ||||
Radeon R7 360 | $110 |
290 Comments
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soldier45 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
AMD fanboys as bad as Apple ones...Michael Bay - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
Just more desperate.chizow - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
And fans of inferior products. At least Apple products excel in end-user experience and functionality even if they tend to skimp on pure hardware.slickr - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
The Fury line is amazing, no doubt about it. Fury X is the graphic card to get for high end gaming, its small form factor, its water cooled which means really quiet, really cool, keeps the inside case temperatures low as well.That said their rest of the lineup is garbage, actual garbage! All of the 300 series are rebagged 200 series cards with absolutely no optimizations either. I thought that they would at least update the feature set and introduce new stuff, but no.
The expected price cuts are nowhere to be seen either. From the low end to mid range at $150 to the high end at $330 and $430 these are all high prices. I can find a 290 for $240 these days, I can find a 290x for $350 these days. Why are the rebaged turds more expensive than the 200 series turds?
AMD are done, I expected a new line, a new architecture or at least significant changes to the point its almost a new architecture, but no we got the same old shit cards from 4 years ago and the 200 series are regabed turds from the 7000 series.
Same fucking price, same performance, same power consumption, same crap features as 4 years ago and higher prices. Bye, bye AMD I'm going to Nvidia you morons! I was waiting for AMD to release their "new" line to upgrade, but no they are morons and they release 4 years old turds that can't even run windows OS!
FMinus - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
If the re-branded line stays competitive, the general public does not care, neither do I. If we go by the benches, the R9 390X is on par with the 980GTX or slightly above it at certain resolutions, for $70 cheaper this is a deal, regardless of re-branding or not.redcloudsk - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Why....Why.....Why.....no HDMI 2.0..............huge disappointment for peopl who use 4k TV as a monitor......chizow - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Welp. Rebrandeon 300 series happened contrary to what many of you said months ago after the AMD Financial Analsysts Day, so I guess I told you so. :)Fury looks to be a solid part though, good thing AMD priced it accordingly, those early pricing rumors wouldn't have held up well in the marketplace, I don't think.
Still some unknowns however going forward, how badly 4GB will impact Fury, how much HBM will benefit, and exactly what features AMD GCN can and cannot do in DX12. We'll see soon enough I am sure, hopefully AMD doesn't forget to send out some Fury's to AT in the next few weeks! :)
JDG1980 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
I just don't see these rebrands as being at all competitive. The Hawaii rebadges, in terms of pure performance, are roughly on par with the GTX 970 and GTX 980 respectively, but they use about twice as much power and have a far more outdated feature set (to name a few examples: GM204 has HDMI 2.0, hybrid HEVC decoding, better support for DirectX 12 features, and DSR is superior to AMD's VSR except perhaps on GCN 1.2 cards). Given that, pricing the Hawaii rebadges so close to the GM204 offerings just isn't realistic. Worse for AMD, Nvidia has a lot more room to drop prices (GTX 980 should really be quite a bit lower - the big price gap between it and the GTX 970 only made sense when it was a flagship card.) Because GM204 has a smaller die, a memory bus half as wide, and much lower power requirements, it's much cheaper to product GM204 cards than Hawaii cards. So AMD can't gain profits if they try to compete on price.What AMD really should have done was release Tonga as the R9 380 (instead of the R9 285) in the first place. They could then have rebranded Hawaii to R9 390/R9 390X at the same time (last September). If done as a "virtual release" (no reference cards), this would serve the purpose of getting the terrible reference Hawaii benchmarks off the charts and replaced with more representative figures from AIB cards. AMD could have stuck with the old 200-series branding for everything below Tonga, and just discontinued the Tahiti cards. This would have saved AMD the humiliation of having to rebrand the over three-year-old Pitcairn chip yet again. The impact of rebadging would have been reduced, since there would have been one truly new chip (Tonga) and only one rebranded chip (Hawaii). And when the Fury release came around, it wouldn't be marred by having to share the stage with a bunch of shoddy rebadges.
One thing is for sure, AMD really needs to have a whole new lineup for 2016 when the FinFET process finally rolls around. The fact that they were only able to afford two new designs for all of 2015 (Fiji and Carrizo) is worrisome. They're going to be bringing out the server/HEDT version of Zen, plus a 28nm desktop Excavator APU, in 2016. Can they afford to spin three or more FinFET GPUs on top of that? Southern Islands (7000 series) had 3 new chips released in the first wave, so I'd consider that a minimum requirement for a viable launch of a new generation. If AMD releases only one FinFET chip and rebadges everything else yet again, I think even their remaining die-hard fans are going to desert them.
chizow - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Fully agree with the first paragraph, but it is obvious Nvidia will have to adjust the 980 price again, not so much against the 290X, but more against pressure from Fury Pro and Nano. They have some time before this happens. The 970 still has no peer though, its pretty amazing AMD didn't try to be more competitive here.2nd paragraph, I'd disagree slightly. AMD was clearly waiting for Fiji to be ready to combat Nvidia's Maxwell series, but I guess HBM growing pains and their biggest die ever delayed that process. I still think AMD was caught unprepared on 28nm pt. 2 and they just didn't think Nvidia would launch a whole new generation on 28nm. Once Nvidia came out with the 970/980 they had to scramble and go forward with Fiji and just HBM1.
Personally, I think they should've just gone with their old series designations. Fury X/Pro/Nano just aren't fast enough or priced high enough to justify a different nomenclature. 390X WCE, 390X, 390 would've been just fine, which would have allowed them to sell Hawaii rebrands as 380/X, Tonga rebrands as 370, Bonaire as 360. No Rebrandeon chuckles. :)
They'll certainly have a whole new lineup for 14/16nm FinFET, but how they release will be a telling sign on how far behind their R&D has fallen. They can get a pass for expecting 20nm to be ready and getting caught offguard with 28nm redux, but they won't get a pass for 14/16nm.
Qwertilot - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
Biggest pressure on the 980 is probably from the ti ;)If the rumours about (really very limited to start with) availability for Fury are true, they couldn't really have put it in the stack as a 390 on those grounds alone. Feels like they had to launch it a little earlier than really ideal (the 4GB too of course) but I suppose its more about getting some mindshare at this point anyway.
You can, I think, see a good chunk of their future finfet line up. Just die shrink fury, half its TDP and there you go for the mid range line :) Might be quite effective if doing it that way lets them get there a bit ahead of NV.
Top end less clear, but that'll probably need HBM2 which seems like it might be a hold up.