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AMD Launches Radeon R9 380X, Fastest GPU Under $250 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Although AMD's mid-range GPU line-up has been relatively strong for a while now, the company is launching the new Radeon R9 380X today with the goal of taking down competing graphics cards like NVIDIA's popular GeForce GTX 960. The Radeon R9 380X has a fully-functional AMD Tonga GPU with all 32 compute units / 2048 shader processors enabled. AMD's reference specifications call for 970MHz+ engine clock with 4GB of 1425MHz GDDR5 memory (5.7 Gbps effective). Typical board power is 190W and cards require a pair of supplemental 6-pin power feeds. The vast majority of the Radeon R9 380X cards that will hit the market, however, will likely be custom models that are factory overlcocked and look nothing like AMD's reference design. The Radeon R9 380X, or more specifically the factory overclocked Sapphire Nitro R9 380X tested, performed significantly better than AMD's Radeon R9 285 or NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960 across the board. The 380X, however, could not catch more powerful and more expensive cards like the GeForce GTX 970. Regardless, the Radeon R9 380X is easily the fastest graphics card on the market right now, under $250.
They're really drawing a fine line on this one.
Seeing as how the GTX 970 has broken under the $300 mark in the last few weeks, they're not doing much to sell me on the R9 380X.
Cheapest 970 was 285 on newegg (and out of stock) 35 bucks call thats 15% more and it's averages a good bit more FPS on some games as much as 50% more then this cards numbers.
No sir I dont like it.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU PCI EXPRESS COWS!!
Plenty of 970s available under $300. 970 is over a year old and uses less power than this new 380x. Plenty of 960s can be had under $200 and use even less power.
Not sure how relevant this card is, AMD needs to try harder because NV is only getting strong and we need the competition.
The performance per energy consumption still lags greatly behind NVIDIA offerings.
Besides that, there is CUDA, yes I know it's a closed standard but there is a reason most GPU computing libraries, specially in Deep Learning fields use preferably CUDA: it's just easier to get more performance out of it with less hassle.
If you just want to play games and electricity costs are not a concern to you (so, most teenagers I suppose) Radeon is ok, but if you are not in that category, I find it hard not to have to choose a GeForce.
https://slickdeals.net/f/8262137-zotac-geforce-gtx-970-4gb-256-bit-video-card-250-free-shipping?src=SiteSearch
That's actually 249.99 for a GTX 970 including an AAA game. Free shipping.
It's been a long time (relatively speaking) since I've played the graphics card game. I remember that AMD's cards were technically solid, but often plagued with driver issues. Even now I'm reading about performance issues with Fallout 4 (which is probably Bethesda's fault because it's an unpatched Bethesda game.)
Has the situation improved? Am I holding onto old biases?
(Alas, for the heady days of my Voodoo2.)
Why doesn't AMD just shut down and leave all the work to Intel? If you look at modern hardware all across the world, from general-purpose to embedded, the CPUs and the chipsets and the LCDs are basically made by 2 or 3 big companies, with usually one leader and the other two playing catch-up. Capitalism has essentially failed in its mission to create healthy competition as barriers are so high and it's always lower risk to be bought out rather than to compete - so, instead you have central control, but with the inefficiency of profit.
I think this should be celebrated, but that we should acknowledge that the emperor has no clothes. Let's return to cooperative effort.
A good deal except for that AMD's Linux drivers are pretty bad. Link.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Why doesn't AMD just shut down and leave all the work to Intel?
Because AMD is the only way we have to keep Intel from going full monopolist. The qualitative effect on the market from the difference between one and two makers of a particular product, such as CPUs that run a particular instruction set, is far greater than that between two and three.
1- buy 100 of these and set up a sweet bitcoin miner rig
2- Mine billions of dollars worth of bitcoins
3- use some of the money to design and kickstart an ASIC beowulf cluster of bitcoin miners that do TERRAhashes per second
4- Take orders for the ASICs and then use the money to build the ASICs and use them to mine bitcoins before shipping them really really late
5- Ship the ASICs to the customers after the difficulty rating is significantly above the point where any profit would be made off of them.
6- ???
7- Profit!
When they say 190W "board power", I'm thinking holy cow - that is about $40 a month in electricity (here in socal, in the high tier).
But that's assuming 190W draw, 24/7... So how much power do video cards really use? Assuming in typical use; mostly normal apps, some gaming, a lot of screen asleep time... does anyone have an idea?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I looked for a mainstream card the other day. There is way too much to choose from and many are really nothing new just repackaged with new model sequence.
Its really very hard to buy longevity into any card these days. Games are increasingly focused on one series of cards and unless you have the right one you end up with some lesser performance. Even now I question how PC gaming can move forward with this ever changing and improving environment. Console gaming is not cheap but at least the gaming developer has a set hardware spec to base its game on. This provides some positives against the vast differences in PC gaming hardware. I found that if your going to play the most recent games its going to cost you on a PC and you will most likely end up buying hardware more frequently to keep up.
You're 12, aren't you.
They pulled drivers for "obsolete* GPUs from the Linux kernel, making all of those cards broken, mine included. Nvidia drivers may be closed, but at least they support pretty much everything they ever made.
Is it good enough for the Oculus Rift? That's all I care about now, as I look to replace my 5 year old laptop with something Rift capable when it comes out next year.
They pulled drivers for "obsolete* GPUs from the Linux kernel, making all of those cards broken, mine included. Nvidia drivers may be closed, but at least they support pretty much everything they ever made.
Not necessarily. I have old AMD cards in Linux boxes that are now headless servers in the closet. At most a KVM switch will access them in text mode, their GUI days are over.
They should take the ARM model and simply license their AMD64 core (i.e. instruction set and everything) to top of the line fabs aside from Intel
AMD has a cross-license with Intel to cover patented parts of x86 and x86-64 instruction sets. I'm not entirely certain to what extent this license extends to licensing AMD64 cores to SoC makers beyond what AMD is already doing with the APUs in Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
If a video card needs a fan it's wasting too much power. This high end gaming stuff is idiotic.
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I have been playing Fallout 4 since release. I have an AMD card, and have had little problems. I was a bit worried, as my particular card model (7850) was technically below the "minimum" specs, which call for at least a 7870. Which first of all doesn't make any sense, as the 7850 would beat the pants off of the nVIDIA card they listed and several others above that which doesn't make a lot of sense.
When I first tried to play the game, I had to swallow hard, as it initially refused to load, and dumped me a message saying something about my video card not meeting requirements. However I've been playing nothing really but DOTA2 for sometime, and it had been probably a year since I updated my AMD video drivers. Once I went and did that (which took 5 mins), it worked flawlessly. I let Fallout 4 detect my settings, and used whatever it gave me. However on inspection everything is set to "On" or "High" and even "Ultra High", and I have had no video issues with slowness or stuttering, so I am a bit perplexed about the Fallout 4 minimum requirements. About the only thing I can think of is I am not running a multiple monitor setup for gaming, so I don't have some ridiculous resolution going on. That said I am running a 24" on max which is probably 1600x1200 or whatever it may be, so it isn't all that tiny either. I do get what seem like some longer load times when entering a new area (perhaps that is what they are talking about), though I attributed that to perhaps my CPU more than anything else (4670K). For reference I am also running Windows 7 64bit and the game is loaded on a Mushkin 240GB mSATA SSD.
I've owned mostly AMD, and for the most part has been positive.
OK. If the card is ready for Linux then I'll buy it. I've been using AMD drivers on Linux and it works great!
Losing it OpenCL 1.0 support, which the fglrx driver had, but which clover/mesa has decided 'isn't worth prioritizing', leaving anyone with those cards unable to benefit from their capabilities (Their double precision floating point performance is comparable to some of the later cards, and is actually superior to lots of newer AMD/Nvidia cards since they gimped the SIMD units to only single precision with seperate DP modules, resulting in 1/8 to 1/32 the expected FLOPS.)
Furthermore it made the WiiU look bad since it came to market 3-6 months AFTER AMD dropped support for its GPU. That sort of obsolescence made the WiiU look even worse than its price/memory in comparison to its slightly later competitors.