AMD to Launch First "Polaris" Graphics Cards by Late May

[Basard]

It will be cpu limited. Next question?

But playable?

 

[Frick]

But playable?

For a given definition of playable, yes.

 

[arbiter]

Please don't make my Fury irrelevant....Please don't make my Fury irrelevant...

Nvidia already did that with gtx1080 reveal, faster card, 75less watt's.

You are missing the quote "in VR" or "under these specific circumstances" it doesn't have anything specifically listed as to when that happens.

And a single 980ti competes pretty well will 980 SLI afaik, depending a bit on the game.

No where in the PR did it say "in VR" the graph's point to around 50-65% faster then a 980. That is around range of what SLI will scale in most games so reality looks like it is faster cause won't have SLI loss holding it back or CF in AMD's case.

Of course they wont be close to fury, these are lower-to-mid range cards, around the 390 level. Vega in 2017 is furys replacement. AMD is keeping quiet because either
A.) polaris is far better than pascal, with a huge advantage in that tiny die, perhaps it is more power efficient or scales better. AMD knows this, knows that they can match nvidias performance at a lower price, and can make a hefty profit while nvidia will have to cut prices across the board to keep up, a reversal of what happened with the 300 series. They keep this news secret until just before pascal's launch, then reveal Polaris, and ruin nvidia's launch day sales.
B.) Polaris is weaker than AMD expected. They have gone on about power efficiency, but now about performance much, suggesting polaris isnt the smash hit they expected. They are keeping mum until they can figure something out marketing wise to sell polaris.
My guess is A.) is more likely. Polaris is an enhanced GCN design, and has a smaller die than nvidia, much like evergreen vs fermi. And polaris is the first major project that lisa su has been CEO for a majority of, so this could be the fruits of AMD's labor. If AMD can pull a $300 card, with the rumored 390/390x performance at ~130 watt TDP, AMD would be in a pretty good spot.

A) i don't think polaris will be better. At best probably be almost same. Even with AMD keeping chip a secret nvidia isn't stupid and knows what amd likely will put out. They nailed fury x pretty much dead on with power they put in the 980ti.

If amd puts a 300$ card out with 390 like performance that could eat in their sales as that puts it in price range of gtx1070 which would be a bit more powerful then it and for people able and willing to pay extra will.

so if Polaris 10 XT will be as powerful as GTX 980 with 110-120w for $250-299. Will you buy it?

if it was 300$ as i posted above no, i no question pay extra 70-80$ get a card that looks like it is around 40-50% more powerful. Some people see that and would agree.

I feel sorry for AMD with so many people having unrealistic expectations. At this point they are a very small company! It makes sense to avoid direct competition with Nvidia, and go after the low-mid segment. Most likely their architecture will be inferior to Pascal mid-range but they will have a few months to gain back market share before they are forced to drop prices in the fall. I'd call that a win, but I suspect most on here will be seriously disappointed.

Yea AMD always gets a ton of hype in their gpu but has been lacking last few generations. they could come up big but shouldn't hype your self up to what hasn't been hype worthy til its proven to be worth it.

But playable?

Seems like game might be at that point is cpu is holding the game back not the gpu. If game is getting to point of cpu limited then testing gpu's on it is pointless since they will all look the same.

 

[Rauelius]

Please don't make my Fury irrelevant....Please don't make my Fury irrelevant...

Hey man, if we GTX980-Ti owners have to deal with the GTX1070, you gotta deal with the R9-480x.

 

[G33k2Fr34k]

Somehow I also think it will be like a cold shower for them. The performance increase between 9 and 10 generation is staggering and I think justified if you think about node improvement, double the GPU frequency and double the memory bandwidth just due to DDR5X. And more than this the price also sounds good ... although I'm like somebody ahead of me, I could never spend more than 250$ on a GPU, especially as in 2-3 years I'll probably upgrade anyway.

I'm in the same position. I'm not planning on spending more than 350 CAD on graphics card, which is around $250 in the US. So I'm probably getting the Polaris Pro card.

I don't think the Polaris 10 cards are ready to run at 40% higher clocks than the Hawaii cards. AMD simply planned for the Polaris 10 cards to replace the 390/390X cards, and so all the testing and packaging for Polaris over the past 4 to 6 months were done under these requirements.

It's unfortunate for AMD that they have such stupid management that decided to not release Fury/FuryX replacements this year and let Nvidia dominate the high-end GFX market. What they didn't account for is Nvidia dominating the mid-range GFX market too.

 

[cdawall]

No where in the PR did it say "in VR" the graph's point to around 50-65% faster then a 980. That is around range of what SLI will scale in most games so reality looks like it is faster cause won't have SLI loss holding it back or CF in AMD's case.

It also didn't list what games it was faster in, or applications.

 

[HumanSmoke]

No where in the PR did it say "in VR" the graph's point to around 50-65% faster then a 980. That is around range of what SLI will scale in most games so reality looks like it is faster cause won't have SLI loss holding it back or CF in AMD's case.

Well, the presentation I saw distinctly mentioned VR numerous times, so I'm not too sure what presentation you watched

 

[ZoneDymo]

Well, the presentation I saw distinctly mentioned VR numerous times, so I'm not too sure what presentation you watched

ermm arent you two agreeing now?
He said 50/60% better performance then the GTX980, lets look at the Witcher 3 there...yep about 60 - 70% better.
The VR info in the lower left is some extra information regarding the first "Virtual Reality" performance comparison.

 

[jaggerwild]

(Fluff n resell)
Neither card is out already arguing which is faster lol. Point is if AMD has a good GPU coming out soon, it better be good! Nvidia is only paper, but were already comparing? I WANT AMD to do good here bring my purchase price point down, no need to spend over $700 on a GPU not IMHO.

 

[Divenity]

Please don't make my Fury irrelevant....Please don't make my Fury irrelevant...

Not sorry to say this: I hope they do... If they don't make the Fury irrelevant, Nvidia will mop the floor with them, way worse than they usually do... because that's exactly what Nvidia did to the Titan, they made it irrelevant (which makes the Fury irrelevant to all except those who irrationally refuse to ever buy Nvidia product)... If AMD doesn't pull something similar the whole company could become irrelevant... and we don't want that now, do we? I know I don't.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Wondering if we are going to have a card this year that can push up to 100 fps on 3440x1440 resolution....

 

[ShurikN]

Hey man, if we GTX980-Ti owners have to deal with the GTX1070, you gotta deal with the R9-480x.

You poor guys with your $600+ 980Ti/FuryX cards... getting to play every game on 1440p@60Hz, max settings... Brings a tear to my eye. It truly does.

 

[FMinus]

I feel sorry for AMD with so many people having unrealistic expectations. At this point they are a very small company! It makes sense to avoid direct competition with Nvidia, and go after the low-mid segment. Most likely their architecture will be inferior to Pascal mid-range but they will have a few months to gain back market share before they are forced to drop prices in the fall. I'd call that a win, but I suspect most on here will be seriously disappointed.

You mean the same AMD that has Radeon GPUs in every known gaming console on the planet and every future console for the foreseeable future? I think their GPU game can only get better.

As for Polaris, they've been telling to the public that they're targeting mid-range, with cheap(er) cards first, so that the general public can get decent VR perfromance and don't have to spend much, meaning low and mid range, where by the way most cards are sold.

In 2017 they bring in Vega, their high-end enthusiast grade cards.

Problem is, people are expecting high-end cards from AMD and Polaris and that's not the case, at least not by the things AMD have said themselves. And frankly truth be told AMD vs. Nvidia was always pretty much on-par, few frames here few frames there, there was never such a big gap in performance that one brand was clearly demolishing the other - however that's different for market share, where nvidia has the majority of the GPU segment, but that has little to do with the actual GPU performance, because even in the HD5000 era, where AMD was roasting Nvidia on a stake, because the performance of AMD cards was really really huge compared to anything from Nvidia, people were still buying Nvidia cards, which means that AMDs marketing game is just bad, nothing else.

That being said, AMDs problems aren't from their GPU segment, they stem from their CPU problems, that's where the big money is being made and that's where AMD is lacking. If AMD steps up their game with their CPU branch, and they become competitive again, that's where they'll make the bulk of their money. Compared to that the GPU market is peanuts, even if they'd hold ~80% of it, like Nvidia does currently.

 

[FMinus]

If GTX 1080 is as fast as GTX 980Ti, R9 490X being slower than R9 Fury wouldn't make any sense at all. It means it would be vastly slower than GTX 1080 then.

That's because you have to look at it the other way.


GTX 1080 = GTX 980 replacement
GTX 1070 = GTX 970 replacement

Polaris 10A (480) = R9 380 replacement
Polaris 10B (480x) = R9 380x replacement

and maybe they'll have lower samples too which will replace the R7 370/R9 270 and 360/260 cards.
They aren't bringing their R9 390/390x & Fury replacements out, that's Vega.

 

[Kanan]

That's because you have to look at it the other way.


GTX 1080 = GTX 980 replacement
GTX 1070 = GTX 970 replacement

Polaris 10A (480) = R9 380 replacement
Polaris 10B (480x) = R9 380x replacement

and maybe they'll have lower samples too which will replace the R7 370/R9 270 and 360/260 cards.
They aren't bringing their R9 390/390x & Fury replacements out, that's Vega.

I think the replacement of the 390/390X has nothing to do with Vega. That's just a bigger Polaris (semi big size GPU, about 400-450mm² compared to the mid size GPU of Polaris10, thats just 200-250mm²). Vega will be a "big GPU" (550-600mm²+), basically named Fury (X)2. Saying this... maybe the semi big sized Polaris chips come a few months later.

Disclaimer: Speculation.

 

[arbiter]

ermm arent you two agreeing now?
He said 50/60% better performance then the GTX980, lets look at the Witcher 3 there...yep about 60 - 70% better.
The VR info in the lower left is some extra information regarding the first "Virtual Reality" performance comparison.

Thank you for pointing out what in right in front of people's face but they neglect to READ.

 

[Divenity]

I think the replacement of the 390/390X has nothing to do with Vega. That's just a bigger Polaris (semi big size GPU, about 400-450mm² compared to the mid size GPU of Polaris10, thats just 200-250mm²). Vega will be a "big GPU" (550-600mm²+), basically named Fury (X)2. Saying this... maybe the semi big sized Polaris chips come a few months later.

Disclaimer: Speculation.

Very likely this, the 490 and 490X will come with Polaris, Vega will be the Fury of this generation...

I'll be grabbing a 490X when it comes out (as long as they perform well enough, the 1070 may be a better value), if nothing else to keep heat down, my old 7990 puts out too much heat, my PC room is a hell of a lot warmer than the rest of my house - and with how little power these new GPUs use, should see much lower temps.

 

[yotano211]

I'll stick with my laptop for another 1.5 years.

 

[JunkBear]

Please don't make my Fury irrelevant....Please don't make my Fury irrelevant...

Man I still have a GeForce GT8600 512megs. How irrevelant do you think my card is compared to a Fury??

 

[MrGenius]

Man I still have a GeForce GT8600 512megs. How irrevelant do you think my card is compared to a Fury??

About as irrelevant as a Radeon HD 2600XT 512MB. More or less.

 

[HumanSmoke]

About as irrelevant as a Radeon HD 2600XT 512MB. More or less.

Whew! Good to know. I was wondering if I hadn't made a mistake by haphazardly storing 2400XT's and 2600XT's in the garage

 

[RejZoR]

That's because you have to look at it the other way.


GTX 1080 = GTX 980 replacement
GTX 1070 = GTX 970 replacement

Polaris 10A (480) = R9 380 replacement
Polaris 10B (480x) = R9 380x replacement

and maybe they'll have lower samples too which will replace the R7 370/R9 270 and 360/260 cards.
They aren't bringing their R9 390/390x & Fury replacements out, that's Vega.

Which again just proves my point. 480/480X series can't be of equal speed as 380/380X. Meaning they'll have to be closer to 390/390X series. And if you do that, you have too push 490/490X series higher. And considering 390X was already eating into Fury segment in some games, they are forced to make Fury cards faster. It's how progress with graphic cards has worked since the beginning of time. AMD rebranding old stuff just made it stagnate a bit, but they were able to afford that because they had cards fast enough. But indirectly, they also lost customers who would upgrade from R9-290X to proper R390X. But since it was basically just a rebrand, most haven't.

 

[john_]

Please don't make my Fury irrelevant....Please don't make my Fury irrelevant...

You are kidding, right?

 

[medi01]

Polaris is low-mid end, 390X performance for $200-$300.

Well, possibly.
If you are talking about 480/480x.
But if they plan to release 490/490x too (which, afaik, they do) staying on 390x levels would be a huge dissappointment (and fuck lower power consumption)

And what about DX12 and AMD "advantage"?.

Need to see real benchmarks to see if Pascal caught up.
And its advantage, not "advantage".

If AMD can pull a $300 card, with the rumored 390/390x performance at ~130 watt TDP, AMD would be in a pretty good spot.

There you have 1070 for not that much more, which is PRed to be "faster than Titanium X" (most people wouldn't realize "at certain things in VR").

I mean, in the end it will depend on the tone of the reviewers. As such card would be either/or:
a) amazing value, very low power consumption, can bring you 1080p VR, NVs products still not fast enough for 4k, yeehaa!
b) slower than 970 which is only 79$ more expensive

From what I recall, most reviewers, and TPU in particular, will go with option B. And there go AMD sales...

Yea AMD always gets a ton of hype

Yeah, like 1070 being much faster than TX, oh wait...

There is no hype whatsoever around Polaris.

 

[G33k2Fr34k]

I think the replacement of the 390/390X has nothing to do with Vega. That's just a bigger Polaris (semi big size GPU, about 400-450mm² compared to the mid size GPU of Polaris10, thats just 200-250mm²). Vega will be a "big GPU" (550-600mm²+), basically named Fury (X)2. Saying this... maybe the semi big sized Polaris chips come a few months later.

Disclaimer: Speculation.

Back in Early March, AMD demoed a Polaris 10 GFX running the new Hitman game in DX12 mode at 2k on "highest settings". The performance was consistently above 60 fps. The Polaris 10 card that was demoed back then was the pro card, not the XT, because GDDR5X started mass production in mid March, so it wasn't available then.

The only AMD cards that score above 60fps are the 390X, Fury and FuryX. This means that Polaris 10 Pro is at least as fast as the 390X. That is an excellent performance level for a ~230mm^2 chip running at ~1GHz.
I think AMD has done an good job with Polaris and have fixed many of the bottlenecks that were present in the original GCN micro-architecture. We're talking about a card that has 80% (36/44) of the SP resources of the 390X and similar clocks speeds. That's at least a 25% increase in shader efficiency going from Hawaii to Polaris. I expect the Polaris 10 XT to get dangerously close to the FuryX.