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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PeckingOrder - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
What a massive F-up by AMD.evolucion8 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Sure, cause AMD midrange GPUs are meant to replace previous high end of GPUs lolddriver - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
In the chart, the AMD Radeon RX 480 (4GB) is listed as having 8 gigs of vram.ddriver - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
I mean the "AMD Radeon GPU Specification Comparison" chart.SunnyNW - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Ryan Shrout of PCper said Every RX480 actually has 8GB of memory on the board..Like WTF...He further added that they sent bios to switch the cars between 4GB and 8GB. I understand the artificial prodcuct segmentation that often happens in tech but with the large number AMD hopes to sell that is A LOT of wasted memory! WOW what a waste they should have just had 8GB reference only and priced it 10 to 15 bucks less...Drumsticks - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
This is only for the press. The retail 4GB cards have 4GB of VRAM, per the AMA on reddit.akamateau - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
4 and 8gb are currently being released.Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/XFX-Radeon-Graphics-Cards-R...
Newegg here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
akamateau - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
2 RX 480 CRUSHES GTX 1080 for $200 less!!!basroil - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
"2 RX 480 CRUSHES GTX 1080 for $200 less!!!"That's if any motherboards even support that configuration! Tests have shown that the card:
1) Draws closer to 165W, much higher than it's actual supported maximum power draw of 150W
2) ~80W of that is from the PCIe slot itself. Motherboards are only required to allow 75W for ALL PCIe slots. Either way it will overload the traces on cheaper boards.
Put those together and you have a nightmare fuel of either frying the mobo with >150W draw when even 2x1080 wouldn't hit 75W, or frying your PSU as the cards reroute power to the PCIe power cable and overload the 75W capable 6pins with double their rated amperage.
binarydissonance - Wednesday, June 29, 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.