Monday, August 24th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Nears Launch, 50% Higher Performance per Watt over Fury X
AMD's ultra-compact graphics card based on its "Fiji" silicon, the Radeon R9 Nano (or R9 Fury-Nano), is nearing its late-August/early-September launch. At its most recent "Hot Chips" presentation, AMD put out more interesting numbers related to the card. To begin with, it lives up to the promise of being faster than the R9 290X, at nearly half its power draw. The R9 Nano has 90% higher performance/Watt over the R9 290X. More importantly, it has about 50% higher performance/Watt over the company's current flagship single-GPU product, the Radeon R9 Fury X. With these performance figures, the R9 Nano will be targeted at compact gaming-PC builds that are capable of 1440p gaming.
Source:
Golem.de
106 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Nears Launch, 50% Higher Performance per Watt over Fury X
Morale of the story is these are the same numbers, more or less, AMD put out during the conference.
The true GTX Gaming version showed as GTX 780 June 2013; AMD had Hawaii in the market Oct 2013, but yes the 290X was 5 months behind. That's was where AMD really started faltering, not have the money or foresight to get moving with big die's like Hawaii and Fiji has been their Achilles Heel.
50% Higher Performance per €/$ over Fury X :P
So you want AMD to release an ultra competitive GPU that takes on the 970 directly? Are you blind? They already have one in the 390. It goes toe to toe and beats the 970 for the same price. Just because it doesn't have an "X" means you don't consider it? For the same price you get 8GB VRAM, around the same performance, and no stuttering issues. So what if it gulps power instead of drinks. The only better option is almost $200 higher which isn't much better in fps. Until NV drops the 980 under 390X prices, there is no competition.
Ok maybe that, and we'll see :D
The R9 Nano is designed to be a niche product. It aims to prove that GCN is still a slightly viable architecture to work with (and maybe, just maybe AMD is still a viable choice for your consumer graphics needs), despite the fact that both fully fledged 1.0 (Tahiti) and 1.1 (Hawaii) were monsters with respect to power consumption. It is not a direct competitor to the GTX 970; the R9 390 and 390X are supposed to be the hard-hitters that take on the GTX 970 and GTX 980 (with the latter having stiffer competition in the R9 Fury). Before you are quick to mention that Asus and GB have "mini-ITX" versions of the GTX 970, the R9 Nano is restricted to that niche, unlike the GTX 970, whose most popular variants are cards like the Strix, TF5, and ACX 2.0. The SG08 is a wonderful example of a single (1, not all of the mini-ITX cases, but 1 among perhaps 3 or 4 in total) mini-ITX case that has the strict limits on PCIe card length that may demand a card like the GTX 970 DC Mini or the R9 Nano, depending on the length of the PSU that you choose.
If the R9 Nano is released with a high asking price, it shouldn't be of any surprise to anyone since the card was never marketed as a GTX 970-killer - a GTX 970 DC Mini competitor, perhaps. However, I still cling to the belief that the Fiji product family shouldn't have warranted 3 separate, obscure launches. The Fury X release was the only one that drew significant attention (save for the R9 Nano, of course, we'll see how this one turns out), with most of that attention turning into hype and eventually, disappointment. The R9 Fury kind of just appeared in the background, and seemed incredibly delayed.
We've endured this kind of horrible marketing from AMD since, I dunno, forever? It isn't even something to take note of anymore. When you're losing to the competition in just about everything, what do you do? Find one of the rare things in which you aren't losing, and put it up on your PR slides. Duh. Would "Fury X is more expensive and slower than the GTX 980 Ti" be a better title for AMD's release event? It's just marketing. Learn to read the fine print. He even had a picture dedicated to the fine print.
:toast:
www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=892&pgno=2
As an actual 970 owner, an SLI 970 owner, I can tell you the stuttering was way over exaggerated. I get no noticeable stutter in any of the modern games except one. The one game I do get stutter on is Shadow of Mordor with the HD Textures installed. And the reason it stutters is for some reason it actually ignores the extre 0.5GB of memory and once it fills the 3.5GB it starts using system RAM. And I had the same problem with my 980, it just happened at 4GB. Shadow of Mordor actually will use close to 6GB of VRAM with the HD Textures, and once you start paging out to system RAM you will get stuttering. It isn't any worse on the 970 compared to the 980. The 390 has virtually no overclock potential though, because AMD is already pushing the Hawaii silicon to its clock speed limits with the stock clocks. You are looking at sub-100MHz overclocks on the 390 while I haven't seen a 970 yet that couldn't do a 200MHz overclock.
And lets face it, overclock the video card is no mainstream. With every card coming with some kind of overclock utility bundled with it, and the warranties now covering overclocking, people do consider how a card will overclock in their final decision, especially people on an enthusiust tech site.
Then there is the fact that the 390 is more expensive, by about $30, than the 970. So the 390 is more expensive, performs worse once both are overclocked, performs equally when not overclocked, it uses way more power, puts out way more heat, and takes up way more space in your case. The 970 is already available in basically the same size form factor as the Nano, you'll never find a 390 in that form factor. The only benefit of the 390 is 8GB of VRAM, and all the reviews straight up say 8GB on this card is useless except in select couple of situations.
The 390 has a lot of texturing capability versus the 970. On paper you would expect the 390 to do something vastly better than the 970 but we don't see that in a lot of cases. I suspect when we start using more memory for higher resolution textures that the 390 will suffer a lot less than a 970. This is all to be seen though. More demanding games are in order for us to see how that all goes over.
Nano is adorable, I am curious about this cooler more than anything and how it performs with this card especially considering the small size. Though its not going to be my cup of tea unless I decide to make a new portable system.