Thursday, August 4th 2016
Sapphire Announces the Radeon RX 470 Platinum Edition
Sapphire announced the Radeon RX 470 Platinum Edition OC graphics card. This card is the closest it gets to a market-available reference design AMD board for the RX 470. It sticks to the AMD reference design PCB, with a negligibly higher 1216 MHz engine boost clock (vs. 1206 MHz reference); but a significant 7.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory clock (vs. 6.60 GHz reference). Sapphire customized the cooler design to feature a silvery finish on the cooler shroud, and a matching silver+black backplate covering the length of the PCB. This card could be priced close to the $179 MSRP set for the RX 470.
34 Comments on Sapphire Announces the Radeon RX 470 Platinum Edition
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202230&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-Veeralava LLC-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=6202798&SID=
Although I will say that this 470 you linked to really should be $180.
I didn't know at that time it had backing plate, but did notice it had a modest OC.. Thought there might be hope for volume of the 470 to hold to some reasonable pricing. But then when you see the prices of 970's Nvidia is maintaining, most often $250 on up, one can only deduce the market is still buying and willing to ante up, so why not take it (Newegg) from to pool if there's the willing and grab it while they can!
Consider that for $600 you can get 3 x 470's that will dominate the 1080 and even match the $1200 Titan XP. Now I am staying away from crossfire right now, but if the games you play support it it really is a crazy example of how bonkers Nvidia is right now.
Personally I think AMD should just discontinue both the 8GB 470 and 4GB 480. Then tell AIB's to aim for $200 for the 470 and $260 for the 480.
Could RTG just drop in such improved chips and re-name with a 475/485 designation, while then hold to these what seem right now oddly extortionate prices? If they just tweak the clocks a little more, hold/reduce TDP, and see a slightly more OC headroom these cards would really hit the mark at these prices.
Also notice that the 470 is a lot more efficient than the 480, and I expect the 460 to be WAY more efficient than the 470 (Thus providing evidence for my claim).
There are other rumors too that Vega may bring a full overhaul to the architecture with tiled-based rendering (What Maxwell did to get such huge gains). In fact if you look on their roadmaps Vega replaces EVERYTHING from top to bottom including Polaris. This rumor goes hand-in-hand with what I said. AMD is just spitting out the cheapest chips they can while they prepare their new arch that requires GloFlo's 14nm process to mature.
AMD has said it will go with the Foundry / Process that make sense for the product delivery and price.
www.extremetech.com/computing/232493-amd-has-built-hardware-at-samsung-could-tap-foundry-for-future-products
I wouldn't be surprised if they launch a 4096-sp 512-bit card on 16nm though. After all they can't just let Nvidia have the entire enthusiast market until Vega comes out in December (If we are lucky).
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480_CrossFire/19.html
Just look at those performance averages. Non-scaling games pull the average way down compared to a stock 1080, discounting the 10%+ guaranteed overclock you get on them. The RX 480 Crossfire setup does worse than 970 SLI at Fallout 4. Add on the fact that you only get good scaling on the games that do work after a couple months of patches, and any Polaris crossfire setup is hot, loud, uses twice as much electricity, and is inconsistent. A 1070 would give you much better performance 90% of the time for the same cost or less. Get your ridiculous assertions out of here.
Now you have read it, but it seems you have still completely missed the point of what I was saying. At no point did I say I would recommend 3-way crossfire, and in fact I wouldn't considering how many of the latest games aren't using it. However Nvidia's pricing is so insane right now that people are considering some ridiculous alternatives - that's my point.
And frankly, I can't blame them either. Let's break down why:
-3 x 470's for $180 (Cheapest option I saw on newegg at launch) costs a total of $540
-In games that support crossfire these should match a Titan XP.
-In games that don't scale the end-user still only paid 45% as much!
Thus even if only half of the games a user plays support it, it almost doesn't matter. They paid so much less! That is how ridiculous the current high-end is right now, and that is why the 470 and 480 are constantly sold out.
P.S. The Fury X beats the 1070 in true DX12 / Vulkan games already lol.
www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/evga_geforce_gtx_1070_sc_superclocked_gaming_review,15.html
I guess you can hold on for dear life to DOOM Vulkan performance, but seeing as Nvidia hasn't updated their Vulkan drivers to implement async yet, it would be foolish to suggest that those results will be the same for all Vulkan games. Plus, the 1070 is the same price (within $50 at least) and literally half the power draw. And you don't have to find a spot for a radiator or deal with pump noise and, frankly, pretty shitty frametimes:
techreport.com/review/30413/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-graphics-card-reviewed/7
Check the bottom of that page and others. The Fury X stutters more than the 1070 at every single game. So maybe it gets close to average frame times, but have fun with your fits and starts. Really worth saving the $50 that you'll spend on extra electricity in a year!
You seem to think you're entitled to linear performance increases for dollar spent. That's just not how this works. AMD charges what they do because their cards are inferior. Nvidia charges what they want right now because most people are fine with a 1060 and the rest of us will buy good cards for extra money. The average person is not going to drop $1200 on a Titan XP, but isn't it nice that a 4K60 card finally exists? And Nvidia will sell it to you! AMD will give you a technically adequate solution that doesn't actually work half the time (or worse). Sure, if you can find 3 470's for MSRP (probably closer to $650-700 after tax and markup from the reference) and crossfire them, you'll get an approximation of maybe a 1080 (definitely not a Titan XP) in games that support crossfire, but the funny thing is no DX12 or Vulkan game supports crossfire at this point, except for AotS. Devs have said that they have to do all the work for multi-card now. Do you really think they're going to make three-way work, ever? And you say that's the future. So really, there is no situation where those cards are going to get a workout. That's why you can get the power so cheap by crossfiring them. Because they are going to spend most of the time stuttering and crashing in new games, and there is no work being done with multi-adapter support in DX12 games beyond AotS.
So you say you're not recommending them, but you sound pretty convinced that crossfire is useful for some odd reason. Or maybe you're just trying to justify why AMD can't even reach 75% of the Titan XP level of performance, and won't be able to until sometime next year.
1) I think it is pretty obvious "True" DX12 games are those that use full Async compute: AoS, Warhammer, and Tombraider (Now that its updated). I have no problem with you ignoring Hitman, just like no one should look at Project Cars benchmarks.
2) I love how you keep talking about this imaginary person who thinks Crossfire is a good idea right now, I would love to meet him. I put the text in bold, but I suppose I could underline it too if you can't read: The fact that people are considering 3-way crossfire over a single card shows you how much people hate Nvidia's pricing. Next time should I put it in all caps?
3) Nobody can predict the future. But what we can do is look at what we know now:
1. AMD's cards have been proven to gain 1-30% more performance in games that utilize Async.
2. Nvidia has a LONG history of building architectures that age horribly. Just look at how a 7970 beats a 780 and you can see why some people refuse to buy high-end Nvidia at this point.
3. DX12 implements systems that basically allow for hardwired crossfire support, but it is new and like all new API's in the past mGPU isn't working right away. Furthermore, AMD is also clearly preparing to make a big push for better crossfire implementation (Although it is far from successful right now lol). Also Nvidia basically told everyone to never SLI again, and frankly their mGPU plan was completely unsustainable years ago. In the future AMD will likely have well-working mGPU, and Nvidia just won't have it. But right now I wouldn't recommend it to most people, and as always nobody really knows what the future holds.
P.S. Can't believe you took that Fury X flamebait :P
That's fine, you can do whatever you want. I'll just treat you like I treat any religious person. Smile and nod.
P.S. Don't have much to say about frame times, do ya? *stutters intensify*
The fact that Pascal only get 5-6 % more performance with async on while GCN get 10-12% isn't working just fine since nvidia async compute is twice less efficient. It's true that it doesn't really matter right know since they still manage to be faster, but that's not a reason. Something is never "just fine" when the competitor get the lead, even for thing as trivial as that.
Next (it's not really toward you) the whole 7970 beat a 780 most likely come from the fact that amd is using GCN for quite a while now, while Nvidia released different architecture. If a recent GCN get gain with a driver, the older are likely to get some gain too. While Nvidia got better stuff to do than going on a hunt for +3 years old gpu driver tweak.
According to guru3D frametime review, it's fine on all card. Nothing that is visually noticable if it's not game engine related.
My conclusion is: AMD doesn't have any money right now so they can't just bring a new architecture out of the blue like that. Navi (2018) seems to be the real huge improvement , but we don't know jacks***t about what it is . All we can do is wait and pray that the gap don't become any larger for us to see a GTX 2060 FE at 423$ because Amd can't compete.
I'm not one of those guy that can afford to put 300-800$/€ on a gpu like it's nothing, I'm in the sub 200 $/€ market, and there isn't a lot of stuff interesting for me at the moment. So I actually enjoy seeing actual competition rather than total ownage. Let's be honest. Who wasn't happy when the Radeon HD 4000 where so fast and so cheap that 250 €/$-160€/$ was enough to get a gaming experience that was worth 500€/$-240€/$ a few month ago ? (and i'm not talking about different gen but actual competitor)