Thursday, November 19th 2015

AMD Announces the Radeon R9 380X Graphics Card
AMD announced the Radeon R9 380X graphics card. Positioned between the Radeon R9 380 and the R9 390, this card starts at US $229, and takes advantage of a huge gap in NVIDIA's lineup, between the GeForce GTX 960 ($190) and the GTX 970 ($319). Based on the 28 nm "Antigua" ("Tonga") silicon, this SKU features the full complement of the chip's 32 Graphics CoreNext (GCN) compute units, amounting to 2,048 stream processors. It also features 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. The core is clocked at 970 MHz, and the memory at 5.70 GHz (GDDR5-effective), amounting to a memory bandwidth of 182 GB/s.
28 Comments on AMD Announces the Radeon R9 380X Graphics Card
While I might say this won't be needed for all that length of a time before all the Tonga/Antigua are replaced by Artic Island Baffin parts. While it wasn't explicitly revealed the synopsis is Nvidia looks to have migrated most/many of the higher binned chips to be place in boards with 4Gb, while lesser binned will remain for 2Gb. Although, the ratio of 4Gb will be the bulk out there, 2Gb remain, permitting them to shore up the more aggressively OC custom that still have OC'n to offer. The 2Gb will be more pedestrian clocks, and more a lottery as to what you'll receive for OC'n.
AMD has for their AIB looked the other way as they're transitioning off the 285 2Gb and offering those as 380 2Gb. There's now like a dozen in the market, but their pricing is still crazy high. I think this is where the "war" will be over the next couple of weeks, and especially after Christmas either 2Gb's will via at $150 -AR.
From all the tests I've looked at it is rare for there to be a benefit with 4GB on either card. Processing power is too weak to make use of more Vram capacity, unless the game is very poorly optimized. But I guess they can bin the processors for the 4GB cards and make them a bit higher tier.
It's the issue I have with 380X, it just didn't seem to punch-up into 1440p to make use of 4Gb's (something the 280X didn't really offer either), pretty much point to shortcoming of again just a 2048 SP part. While now it's MSRP moved down 22%, retrospective a 280X $300 MSRP back from 2 years ago, to price today feels inflated. For less than 22% more you can achieve 1440p using a 390 or 970 or some send less add have great 1080p.