Wednesday, June 1st 2016

AMD Radeon RX 480 Clock Speeds Revealed, Clocked Above 1.2 GHz
Here are the clock speeds of the Radeon RX 480. Like the GeForce "Pascal," AMD "Polaris" GPUs love to run at speeds way above the 1 GHz mark. The Radeon RX 480 features an engine clock of 1266 MHz, while its memory is clocked at 2000 MHz (actual), or 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective).
88 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 480 Clock Speeds Revealed, Clocked Above 1.2 GHz
Going to wait and see how these cards are first..
It's different architecture, and that's it.
You can go high frequency or lower frequency, only resulting performance and power consumption is what matters.
www.overclock3d.net/articles/gpu_displays/amd_explains_dx12_multi_gpu_benefits/1
www.extremetech.com/extreme/199905-report-claims-directx-12-will-enable-amd-and-nvidia-gpus-to-work-side-by-side
www.anandtech.com/show/9740/directx-12-geforce-plus-radeon-mgpu-preview/2
What this card could do "If" panel manufactures figure out what this provides... they could incite a huge migration from 1080p over to 1440p. Companies would be smart to start offer some a standard spec 27" monitor that provide the VERSA Adaptive Sync and say stick to an all-encompassing 60Hz. Gamers that have been at 1080p and a looking to get into a the immersive smooth game play, and can do it for something between $400, though well south of $500 it would drive a exodus from 1080p. A WIN for panel manufactures, WIN for RTG, and a WIN for Gamers. But something tells me that's not going to happen, it feels like the panel manufactures are more wanting to be moving to 4K as mainstream.
If the $229 card performs better than the GTX 980, that would be shockingly good news. But I doubt it.
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Oh, and we have that nice C0 thing in linux drivers:
lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-May/107756.html
lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-May/107758.html
But yes there is a passability that the 490X on my picture will be the RX480X and they will use a new chip for the 490 series.
I mean, 36 Cu > 40 Cu = +11%.
1266Mhz =>... dunno, let's be generous, +100Mhz, so 7.8% increase here.
In case it scales perfectly (there is mem and other things) +11% * +7.8% = ~20% increase.
So if base is C7 with 18090 score, we get to 21687, which is between 980Ti and TitaniumX, still rather short of 1070.
However, 380 and 380 difference in 3DMark was about 9%.
So if we drop clock boost, it's 18090 => 20099, roughly at Ti levels (and likely doable with the same 6 pin power connector).
I'd expect 490 to take on 1070 and 490x to take on 1080, the way 390 and 390x did. (Vega 10)
According to AMD, Polaris 11 will be ~1/2 the capability of the Polaris 10 (shaders and memory bandwidth) and will consume ~50W. It has been assumed that 470 will be Polaris 11, but it could be a reduced Polaris 10 chip, with Polaris 11 being designated 460.
Either way, I'm doubtful that AMD would price a $199 card that beats a GTX 980. That would be *extremely* aggressive pricing, resulting in lower than necessary margins. Obviously Nvidia would need to match them (nearly) with the 1060, meaning that neither company would make good profits. AMD may calculate however that the gain in market share would be worth it, and they might be right. If so, this is very good news for us.
On the speculations here: Polaris10 is 480 and 480X, Polaris 11 is most likely 470 and 470X. 480X will most likely be released later, with 4 more CUs activated (2304 + 4 x 64 = 40 CUs = 2560 shaders on the full chip). Vega will be a bigger chip, with a lot more of shaders, so the 490(X) is not comparable to 480(X), there's no conflict. A new Fury then would essentially be a maximum size chip like Fiji, but I don't see them making another one, because it's simply way too expensive on 14nm Finfet - too many transistors, as to why the big chip of Nvidia will "only" be about 450mm² in size, this time (talking GP102, GP100 is over 600mm² big and extremely expensive as already known). This means, Vega10/Vega11 (490 and 490X) will most likely be the maximum of GCN 4.
Another note, if I cared about power consumption, I wouldn't have invested in SB-E. :p
Just down clocking can leave it using about the same power usage, this does depend on the game too.