The AMD Radeon RX 480 Preview: Polaris Makes Its Mainstream Mark
by Ryan Smith on June 29, 2016 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance, Continued
While AMD’s launch drivers for the RX 480 have by and large been stable, the one outlier here has been Grand Theft Auto V. In the current drivers there is an issue that appears to affect the game’s built-in benchmark on GCN 1.1 and later cards, causing stuttering, reduced performance, and in the case of the 380X, complete crashes. AMD has told me that they’ve discovered the issue as well and will be issuing a fixed driver, but it was not ready in time for the review.
Continuing our look at gaming performance, it’s becoming increasingly clear that RX 480 trends closely to the last generation Radeon R9 390 and the GeForce GTX 970. Given their architectural similarity, in a lot of ways this is a repeat of 390 vs 970 in general; the two cards are sometimes equal, and sometimes far apart. But in the end, on average, they are close together on our 2016 benchmark suite.
For mainstream video card users, this means that last year’s enthusiast-level performance has come down to mainstream prices.
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basroil - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
"Or both the mobo and the PSU are supplying the same voltage and the power input is combined into a single bus... y'know... preventing the unlikely scenario you describe from ever possibly happening."1) The two do NOT have the same voltage. Ideally they do but that's not how things actually work in practice.
2) The folks at tomshardware did bus level analysis of power draws and put their results into their review. Their tests for various cards will prove to you that power draw can indeed be modified to either PCIe slot or power cable and is not 50-50 like you claim.
3) Even assuming that your point was valid (which it most certainly is NOT), it wouldn't change the fact that a single card already draws more power from the PCIe slot than allowable by ATX specifications, and that two cards will be far more than the specs allow (double the spec for PCIe3.0)
schulmaster - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Lol. The PSU is the source for all board power AND PCIE Aux. The board design and PSU will negotiate how much 12V power is reliably sourced from the 24pin. A 6pin PCIe aux is rated for an additional 75W, and that limit could be down to the cable itself, let alone the card interface and/or the PSU. Even high-end OC boards have a supplemental molex connector for multi GPU configs to supplement available bus power, which is the burden of the 24pin. It is not outlandish to have concern if a single RX480 is overdrawing from the entire PCIe bus wattage allotted in the spec, especially when the fall back is a PCIe 6 pin already being overdrawn from as well. Tomshardware was literally unwilling to due further multiGPU testing due to the numbers they were physically seeing, not paranoia.pats1111 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
@binarydissonance: Don't confuse these fanboys with the facts, they're NVIDIA goons, it's a waste of time because they are TROLLSAbbieHoffman - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Actually most motherboards support crossfire. There are many that support only crossfire. Because it is cheaper to make crossfire support than SLI.Gigaplex - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
But they don't support the excessive power consumption on the PCIe bus, which is a specification violation.jospoortvliet - Monday, July 4, 2016 - link
Luckily every motherboard except for cheap ones that are quite old can handle easily 100+ watt over the PCIe port, as any over clocking would need that, too.beck2050 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I just laugh when I see people talking about Crossfirefanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
"when even 2x1080 wouldn't hit 75W"Your post is so full of FUD it should be deleted.
basroil - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
"Your post is so full of FUD it should be deleted. "I'm not responsible for your ignorance. Check tomshardware /reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-pascal,4572-10.html and you'll see I'm right
fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I checked, you are wrong. Stop spreading FUD, you Nvidiot.