AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2014 2:00 PM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
Metro, though perhaps a bit optimistic, does a decent job of setting the tone for this review. Right off the bat we can see that the R9 285 and R9 280 are performing closely to each other, with the newer R9 285 leading by 5-9%. On the whole this is greater than the average, but it’s otherwise a solid example of where the R9 285 fits into AMD’s world. In terms of design it is a lateral, but the same is also true from the resulting performance. It is not meant to – nor generally will it – perform differently from the R9 280 it replaces. R9 285 is in a nutshell an R9 280 with more features.
What this also means though is that AMD generally has the $250 price segment to themselves. In the case of Metro they have little trouble outperforming the GTX 760, and at times come close to the more expensive GTX 770. This is why Metro is a bit optimistic, since on the whole R9 285 isn’t quite enough to catch up to GTX 770.
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Alexvrb - Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - link
"if other GCN 1.1 parts like Hawaii are any indication, it's much more likely the 280 maintains its boost clocks compared to the 285 (due to low TDP limits)"This is what you said. This is where I disagreed with you. The 285 maintains boost just as well as the 280. Further, GCN 1.1 Bonaire and even Hawaii reach and hold boost at stock TDP. The 290 series were not cooled sufficiently using reference coolers, but without any changes to TDP settings (I repeat, stock TDP) they boost fine as long as you cool them. GCN 1.1 boosts fine, end of story.
As far as Tonga goes, there's almost no progress in performance terms. In terms of power it depends on the OEM and I've seen good and bad. The only additions that really are interesting are the increased tessellation performance (though not terribly important at the moment) and finally getting TrueAudio into a mid-range part (it should be across the board by next gen I would hope - PS4 and XB1 have the same Tensilica DSPs).
I would hope they do substantially better with their future releases, or at least release a competent reference design that shows off power efficiency better than some of these third party designs.
chizow - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Yes, and my comment was correct, it will ALWAYS be "more likely" the 280 maintains its boost over other GCN 1.x parts because we know the track record of GCN 1.0 cards and their conservative Boost compared to post-PowerTune GCN1.x and later parts as a result of the black eye caused by Hawaii. There will always be a doubt due to AMD's less-than-honest approach to Boost with Hawaii, plain and simple.I also (correctly) qualified my statement by saying the low stated TDP of the 285 would be a hindrance to exceeding those rated specs and/or the performance of the 280, and we also see that is the case that in order to exceed those speed limits, AMD traded performance for efficiency to the point the 285's power consumption is actually closer to the 250W rated 280.
In any case, in another day or two, this unremarkable part is going to become irrelevant with GM104 Maxwell, no need to further waste any thoughts on it.
etherlore - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Speculating here. The data parallel instructions could be a way to share data between SIMD lanes. I could see this functionality being similar in functionality to what threadgroup local store allows, but without explicit usage of the local store.It's possible this is an extension to, or makes new use of, the 32 LDS integer units in GCN. (section 2.3.2 in the souther islands instruction set docs)
vred - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
And... DP rate at last. Sucks to have it at 1/16 but at least now it's confirmed. First review where I see this data published.chizow - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
It has to be artificially imposed, as AMD has already announced FirePro cards based on the Tonga ASIC that do not suffer from this castrated DP rate. AMD as usual taking a page from Nvidia's playbook, so now all the AMD fans poo-poo'ing Nvidia's sound business decisions can give AMD equal treatment. Somehow I doubt that will happen though!Samus - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
If this is AMD's Radeon refresh, if the 750Ti tells us anything, they are screwed when Maxwell hits the streets next month.Atari2600 - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
The one thing missed in all this - APUs.As we all know, APUs are bandwidth starved. A 30-40% increase in memory subsystem efficiency will do very nicely for removing a major bottleneck.
That is before the move to stacked chips or eDRAM.
limitedaccess - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
@RyanRegarding the compression (delta color compression) changes for Tonga does this have any effect on the actual size of data stored in VRAM.
For instance if you take a 2gb Pitcarin card and a 2gb Tonga card showing the identical scene in a game will they both have identical (monitored) VRAM usage? Assuming of course the scenario here is neither is actually hitting the 2gb VRAM limit.
I'm wondering if it possible to test whether or not this is the case if unconfirmed.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
VRAM usage will differ. Anything color compressed will take up less space (at whatever ratio the color compression algorithm allows). Of course this doesn't account for caching and programs generally taking up as much VRAM as they can, so it doesn't necessarily follow that overall VRAM usage will be lower on Tonga than Pitcairn. But it is something that can at least be tested.abundantcores - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I see Anand still don't understand the purpose of Mantle, if they did they wouldn't be using the most powerful CPU they could find, i would explain it to them but i think its already been explained to them a thousand times and they still don't grasp it.Anand are a joke, they have no understanding of anything.