AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2014 2:00 PM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. As we briefly discussed in our look at the GCN 1.2 architecture these tests mainly serve as a canary for finding important architectural changes, and one of these tests in particular has been significantly impacted by AMD’s newest round of architectural improvements.
At the x64 tessellation factor we see the R9 285 spit out 134fps, or equivalent to roughly 1.47B polygons/second. This is as compared to 79fps (869M Polys/sec) for the R9 290, and 68fps (748M Polys/sec) for the R9 280. One of the things we noted when initially reviewing the R9 290 series was that AMD’s tessellation performance didn’t pick up much in our standard tessellation benchmark (Tessmark at x64) despite the doubling of geometry processors, and it looks like AMD has finally resolved that with GCN 1.2’s efficiency improvements. As this is a test with a ton of small triangles, it looks like we’ve hit a great case for the vertex reuse optimizations.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture and pixel fillrate tests, which present our cards with massive amounts of texturing and color blending work. These aren’t results we suggest comparing across different vendors, but they’re good for tracking improvements and changes within a single product family.
With AMD maintaining their same texture units and same tex:FP32 ratio for Tonga, the end result is that R9 285’s texturing performance is virtually identical to R9 280’s. Ignoring any possibility of caching or bandwidth bottlenecking for the moment, R9 285 can push texels just as well as R9 280 could.
Unlike our texel test, AMD’s delta color compression technology introduced on GCN 1.2 has an incredible impact on R9 285’s pixel throughput. This pixel test is normally memory bandwidth bound, providing something that approaches a best case scenario for AMD’s compression technology. As a result despite possessing nearly 30% less memory bandwidth than the R9 280, the R9 285 tops our charts at 19.9 GPix/sec, blowing past the R9 280 by 68%. Even the R9 290 with its 512-bit memory bus and doubled ROP count still falls short here by over 3GPix/sec, or 16%.
This benchmark in a nutshell is why AMD can deliver the average performance of the Tahiti based R9 280 without Tahiti’s memory bandwidth. By improving their color compression to this point AMD can significantly reduce their memory bandwidth requirements on GCN 1.2, allowing them to do more with less. In real games the result won’t be anywhere near this remarkable since this is a pure pixel fillrate test, but it goes to show that AMD has been able to neutralize their memory bandwidth deficit in graphics workloads.
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TiGr1982 - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
BTW, is Tonga the only new GPU AMD has to offer in 2014?(if I'm not mistaken, the previous one from AMD, Hawaii, was released back in October 2013, almost a year ago)
Does anybody know?
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
The thing is the moment I heard AMD explaining how Tonga was too new for current Mantle applications, I was like, "And there the other shoe is dropping."The promise of low level API is that you get low level access and the developer gets more of the burden of carrying the optimizations for the game instead of a driver team. This is great for the initial release of the game and great for the company that wants to have less of a (or no) driver team, but it's not so great for the end user who is going to wind up getting new cards and needing that Mantle version to work properly on games no longer supported by their developer.
It's hard enough getting publishers and/or developers to work on a game a year or more after release to fix bugs that creep in and in some cases hard to get them to bother with resolution switches, aspect ratio switches, the option to turn off FXAA, the option to choose a software-based AA of your choice, or any of a thousand more doohickeys we should have by now as bog-standard. Can you imagine now relying on that developer--many of whom go completely out of business after finishing said title if they happen to work for Activision or EA--to fix all the problems?
This is why a driver team is better working on it. Even though the driver team may be somewhat removed from the development of the game, the driver team continues to have an incentive to want to fix that game going forward, even if it's a game no longer under development at the publisher. You're going to be hard pressed to convince Bobby Kotick at Activision that it's worth it to keep updating versions of games older than six months (or a year for Call of Duty) because at a certain point, they WANT you to move on to another game. But nVidia and AMD (and I guess Intel?) want to make that game run well on next gen cards to help you move.
This is where Mantle is flawed and where Mantle will never recover. Every time they change GCN, it's going to wind up with a similar problem. And every time they'll wind up saying, "Just switch to the DX version." If Mantle cannot be relied upon for the future, then it is Glide 2.0.
And why even bother at all? Just stick with DirectX from the get-go, optimize for it (as nVidia has shown there is plenty of room for improvement), and stop wasting any money at all on Mantle since it's a temporary version that'll rapidly be out of date and unusable on future hardware.
The-Sponge - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I do not understand how they got there R9 270x temperatures, my OC'd R9 270x never even comes close to the temps they got....mac2j - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
It's great that they've caught up with H.264 on hardware and the card otherwise looks fine. The bottom line for me, though, is that I don't see the point of buying card now without H.265 on hardware and an HDMI 2.0 port - 2 things Maxwell will bring this year. I haven't heard what AMDs timetable is there though.P39Airacobra - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
It really irritates me that they are making these cards throttle to keep power and temps down! That is pathetic! If you can't make the thing right just don't make it! Even if it throttles .1mhz it should not be tolerated! We pay good money for this stuff and we should get what we pay for! It looks like the only AMD cards worth anything are the 270's and under. It stinks you have to go Nvidia to get more power! Because Nvidia really rapes people with their prices! But I must say the GTX 970 is priced great if it is still around $320. But AMD should have never even tried with this R9 285! First of all when you pay that much you should get more than 2GB. And another thing the card is pretty much limited to the performance of the R9 270's because of the V-Ram count! Yeah the 285 has more power than the 270's, But whats the point when you do not have enough V-Ram to take the extra power were you need a card like that to be? In other words if you are limited to 1080p anyway, Why pay the extra money when a R7 265 will handle anything at 1080p beautifully? This R9 285 is a pointless product! It is like buying a rusted out Ford Pinto with a V-8 engine! Yeah the engine is nice! But the car is a pos!P39Airacobra - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
(QUOTE) So a 2GB card is somewhat behind the times as far as cutting edge RAM goes, but it also means that such a card only has ¼ of the RAM capacity of the current-gen consoles, which is a potential problem for playing console ports on the PC (at least without sacrificing asset quality).(SIGH) So now even reviewers are pretending the consoles can outperform a mid range GPU! WOW! How about telling the truth like you did before you got paid off! The only reason a mid range card has problems with console ports is because they are no longer optimized! They just basically make it run on PC and say xxxx you customers here it is! And no the 8GB on the consoles are used for everything not for only V-Ram! We are not stupid idiots that fall for anything like the idiots in Germany back in the 1930's!