Friday, September 4th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
Are we sourgraping? You tell us. We're one of the few sites that give you noise testing by some really expensive and broad-ranged noise-testing equipment, and more importantly, card-only power-draw. Our reviews also grill graphics cards through 22 real-world tests across four resolutions, each, and offer price-performance graphs. When NVIDIA didn't send us a GeForce GTX TITAN-Z sample, we didn't care. We didn't make an announcement like this. At $2,999, it was just a terrible product and we never wished it was part of our graphs. Its competing R9 295X2 could be had under $700, and so it continues to top our performance charts.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
759 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
Dunno, you have to understand what you read and apply it to your specific scenario to get a context. Otherwise score will be meaningless for you like you said.
Translation:
AMD DX11 drivers are not as good as Nvidia
No shit.
but having both i know Mantle destroys Nvidia DX11 performance.
A 290X gets more fps in BF4 than a GTX970. All other things being equal. :p
Ashes has nothing to do with Mantle,
Ashes supports Mantle, now called DX12.
what it does show is problems Nvidia have with DX12
Neither AMD or Nvidia fully support DX12, any feature supported will be GPU dependent.
despite all the noise about having better DX12 support than AMD they don't have Hardware ASync while AMD do. and that actually matters
When Hallock & Co claimed DX12 support, they lied. But all that doesn't matter now.....
:)
They've been overpromising and underdelivering for years now so I wouldn't expect this product to be any different.
It's just a shortage of cards, and a paper launch, just like the Fury and FuryX. No big deal. It only makes sense that it's be a bit lower than the Fury at least... and optimized for 4k (hence the added shaders). If it ends up being more than that, AMD has a clear-cut winner that NVidia cannot answer. If not, it will still be a good card.
Just a thought.
Ah! yes, there was also that other editorial with the not so kind tittle about a company not trusting it's own CPUs, but choosing CPUs from the competition for it's little Quantum project.
Just another thought.
But I don't think that AMD's practices will help. They only guaranty more editorials in the future.
While TR focuses only on a few games, they go thorough with it with the frame latencies/times and what-have-you.
For TPU, it's the sheer amount of video cards benchmarked at the same time, AND the number of benchmarks as well. Then there are the power consumption and noise values too.
So together, you can say you have a "complete picture".
Both are also bashed for being "pro-Nvidia" even after bta said that the Titan-Z isn't worth it at all, while Damage over at Tech Report aren't amused with Nvidia over G-Sync...lol
G3D's testing methods aren't as good as TPU's IMO.... so no surprise to see AMD or anyone owning it sends them for testing. All I know is that the bench won't be realistic (or unbiased) like TPU & all the fanboys who are in a cringe will rejoice coz the Green Team's base 980 or ITX 970 got it's arse kicked in a botched benchmark where the settings used aren't as uniform as TPU's.
Prefer half the price Maxwell and with Pascal round the corner Nano can be swan song from AMD, because Pascal really appears to be beast of the architecture from few leaks/presentations released so far.
It was recently when I kindly ask to turn some work on improving the design of this application:www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/gpu-z-feature-request.212644/
- AMD is so badly in the poop, finances-wise, that they can no longer afford to send free samples to reviewers.
- AMD has gone full retard and decided to shoot themselves in the foot, with a bazooka, by only sampling cards to sites that they believe will give positive reviews.
- Fiji yields are far, far worse than anyone has anticipated. Fewer Fijis = much fewer low-voltage Fijis suitable for Nano = massive supply problems.
- Nano doesn't perform anywhere near as well as AMD has claimed.
Any which way you look at it though, this is a massive issue for AMD, and the root problem is that they just aren't honest with the press and their customers. Every time they delay a launch or release a product that doesn't perform as claimed, they lose more and more trust. Soon they won't have any left, and that will be the end.