AMD Continues To Pressure NVIDIA With Lower Cost Radeon R9 270 and BF4 Bundle

MojoKid writes "The seemingly never-ending onslaught of new graphics cards as of late continues today with the official release of the AMD Radeon R9 270. This mainstream graphics card actually leverages the same GPU that powered last-year's Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. AMD, however, has tweaked the clocks and through software and board level revisions updated the card to allow for more flexible use of its display outputs (using Eyefinity no longer requires the use of a DisplayPort). Versus the 1GHz (GPU) and 4.8Gbps (memory) of the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, the Radeon R9 270 offers slightly lower compute performance (2.37 TFLOPS vs. 2.56 TFLOPS), but much more memory bandwidth--179.2GB/s vs. 153.6GB/s to be exact. AMD and its add in board partners are launching the Radeon R9 270 today, with prices starting at $179. The Radeon R9 270's starting price is somewhat aggressive and once again puts pressure on NVIDIA. GeForce GTX 660 cards, which typically performed lower than the Radeon R9 270 are priced right around the $190 mark. Along with this card, AMD is also announcing an update to its game bundle, and beginning November 13 Radeon R9 270 – R9 290X cards will include a free copy of Battlefield 4. NVIDIA, on the other hand, is offering Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassins Creed – Black Flag, plus $50 off a SHIELD portable gaming device with GTX 660 and 760 cards."

Comments

Christmas is coming earlier and earlier it seems

[Virtucon]

Time to get the shopping done.. These bundles are getting sweeter and sweeter.

Unfortunate Card Naming

[mythosaz]

Maybe someone else has a decoder ring, but it's alphabet soup trying to figure out what video card one should get.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#Comparison_tables:_Desktop_GPUs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Comparison_table:_Desktop_GPUs

If you stare at the article above, it's a blob of numbers worthy of A Simple Mind.

I left the PC gaming rat-race a while back, and I've never been happier -- the only real downside is that I can't possibly suggest to people what video card to buy beyond saying, "meh. Go spend $200 on Newegg."

Re:Unfortunate Card Naming

[OverlordQ]

Chart for the lazy.

Re:Unfortunate Card Naming

[gman003]

AMD's scheme right now is actually pretty easy.

The first number is the generation. We're on "2", even though they just started this new numbering scheme this year, but that's fine.

The next number is the "category". Best way to think of it is monitor resolution: _70 is for 1080p - you'll get 60FPS+ on most games at max settings, real killers may need a settings drop but you'll generally be fine. _80 is for 120Hz or 1440p monitors, and the _90 is for tri-monitor 1080p, 4K, or obscene multi-GPU rigs. And an _60 part is a lower-quality 1080p - think "high" or "medium", not "max".

An X suffix means it's the "full" part, the lack of an X means it's been binned in some way (reduced clockspeeds and/or some cores disabled). For example, the 290X has 44 "compute units", while the 290 has 40 at a slightly lower clockspeed. On the 270s, they're both 20 compute units, but the 270X is clocked about 10% higher.

Since both new consoles use AMD chips, it's worthwhile to compare to them. The PS4 is a bit weaker version of the 270, and the Xbox One is a slightly underclocked 260.

Nvidia's scheme is similar (add another 0 on the end for no reason, swap "Ti" for "X", and be generation 7 instead of 2), but they've complicated it right now by not rebadging old chips as new names. AMD's recent launches were basically "launch a new 9-tier chip, take all the old ones, up the clockspeeds, bump them down a tier and cut their prices accordingly". The 270s that just launched are essentially overclocked 7870s (think "180X").

Right now, Nvidia's lineup starts at the 650 and 650 Ti Boost (medium-end 1080p), 660 and 760 (high-end 1080p), 770 and 780 (1440p), and the 780 Ti (4K). Nobody's really sure whether they're going to launch more low-end 700-series parts. They're also looser with which ones are low bins of what - the 780 is a binned 780 Ti, but the 760 is a binned 770.

PS: Ignore the Titan. It's no longer a gaming card - the 780 Ti outperforms it (the Titan is a binned 780 Ti), at $300 less.

Re:Unfortunate Card Naming

[savuporo]

Nothing. They are completely random marketing labels, and often designed to be misleading. So the commenter above has no clue. This is not T-34 to T-54 "new tank is better than old tank" series here.

If graphics chip marketing guys would have had their say made soviet tanks then T-34 would have been something like CrossFire DUAL 54200 Extreme Edition and T-54 something like 6700 HDD RXX 2GB Edition.

Re:Unfortunate Card Naming

[mrchaotica]

I hope you realize that you just wrote EIGHT paragraphs to describe two naming conventions. It's kind of absurd that such a thing is required.

Re:Unfortunate Card Naming

[UnknownSoldier]

It's real easy ... pick your budget and your tier will follow.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

Re:What about

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Braille displays are comparatively low resolution, and can be driven in software over serial, USB, or Bluetooth without specialized hardware. (The exception might be older TTY/TDD systems, which use some...eccentric encoding schemes that are of very limited compatibility with many computer modems)

Re:Nvidia feeling the heat? XD

[binarylarry]

Oh really? I assume you've never had to write software for these electronic pintos

In Soviet Russia, FreeBSD serves YOU!

[Thor Ablestar]

Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I was a longtime fan of Radeons, and I bought me a new shiny Radeon+Phenom notebook - just to find that the Radeon X-Windows drivers don't support FreeBSD anymore. They need a Kernel Mode Switch that is obviously absent. Now the FreeBSD team implements it while my book collects dust. The Nvidia drivers are closed-source and glitchy - but at least they exist and they work.

Re:Nvidia feeling the heat? XD

[ifiwereasculptor]

For what I have experienced, that perception is a bit outdated. AMD's drivers have been as good as NVIDIA's for about one or two years. On Windows. On Linux, NVIDIA is still way, way better. For newer cards. If you can use the proprietary driver at all.

1650 Rocked

[rsilvergun]

The driver on the 1650 was rock solid. It was like having an Nvidia card but without the crummy color quality (which even I, with my lousy color vision can see).

That said, the 4350 I tried to replace it with was junk. Nice card, good performance, dirt cheap, drivers crashed on everything but Call of Duty. I've heard that if you spend the big bucks ($400) you do alright, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't trust even $190 ranged cards. Which is sad, because $190 for what the R9 270 does is ridiculous...

Re:No 4k numbers?

[0123456]

Video cards even used to be designed to accelerated Autocad for DOS, and had special drivers for this purpose.

Oh God, I think I remember writing some of those :).

No problems here

[Rakhar]

Despite the massive amount of bashing going back and forth here, I feel compelled to point out that I've swapped back and forth between both AMD/ATI and NVidia over the years and I've run into problems with brand new games having glitches with one or the other on both sides. Even having said that, I'm talking two or three times in over a decade. Aside from that I've had fans go out on one card, and it still lasted long enough after that that I didn't feel bad when it came time to buy a new one.

For most people it really doesn't matter what card you get as long as it isn't ancient. For enthusiasts, compare specs and get what you need. If the specs look like they're in Klingon to you, take the time to learn what's what. If you can't be arsed to do that, then you aren't an enthusiast in the first place.

This isn't like rooting for your home sports team. There is no justifiable reason to give complete loyalty to any company when weighing your purchases.

Re:Nvidia feeling the heat? XD

[Xest]

The problem is when do you give them the benefit of the doubt?

I've used AMD cards on and off over the years for well over a decade and the problem has always been that each time I've heard someone say what you just did and tried them it's simply not been true.

Maybe you're right this time, but given how many times I've been bitten it's hard to have any faith in such statements.

My friend uses AMD and is always whining about problems with his cards, especially when it comes to Eyefinity stuff so I'm loathe to believe what you say is true even now, especially when we've also had numerous reports and news stories of frame dropping issues also.

FWIW I first came to realise there was a general and wide ranging issue with AMD drivers back in about 2003 when I was still doing some tech support on a network of over 5000 systems with a wide ranging set of graphics cards between Intel, AMD, and nVidia. That's a pretty large sample size and AMD graphics issues were a couple of orders of magnitude more prominent than any of the others so there has definitely historically been an issue. When I've always had more issues with AMD cards at home (i.e. when laptops I've bought have come with AMD cards) I've just found it difficult to lose that perception - my personal sample sizes haven't of course been as large, so maybe me and my friends have just been insanely unlucky in picking the odd cards with bad drivers but I'm more prone to believing that it's just that AMD has never really got to grips with it's drivers, even now.

But even if they have sorted their fundamental issues with their driver development regime, it's going to take quite some time for them to regain the trust of many people like me - at least a few years without any reports of widespread driver issues.