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AMD RX 480 Offers Best-in-Class Performance For $199/$239
Reader Vigile writes: It's been a terribly long news cycle, but today is finally the day reviews and sales start of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card based on the company's latest Polaris architecture and built on 14nm FinFET process technology. With a starting price tag of $199 for the 4GB model and $239 for the 8GB, the RX 480 has some interesting performance characteristics. Compared to the GeForce GTX 970, currently selling for around $280, the RX 480 performs +/- 5-10% in DX11 games but PC Perspective found that the RX 480 was as much as 40% faster in DX12 titles like Gears of War, Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Compared to previous AMD products, the RX 480 is as fast as a Radeon R9 390 but uses just 150 watts compared to 275 watts for the previous generation. Chances are that NVIDIA will have a competing product based on Pascal available sometime in July, so AMD's advantage may be short-lived; but in the meantime, the Radeon RX 480 is clearly the best GPU for $200.AnandTech has more details.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
So a tech site posts an article with a review about a new piece of tech and it's an ad? As a gamer I find it personally quite interesting to see that AMD has managed to top my current card for significantly less money.
People, reviews about tech products on a tech centered site != ads. If they post an 'article' about budweiser beating out coors in a taste test on this site, that's an ad.
A quick glance at the Vigile's submission history shows that every one of his or her post links to pcper.com. Never heard of the site, and definitely not going to check them out now. If you're going to submit posts like this, at least making your conflict of interest be clear.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
It goes toe to toe with the GTX970 for $199/239, with the lesser card already having 0.5GB more memory in practice. If the GTX1060 pricing rumors of $249/299 for the 3/6GB version are true, they'll enjoy a substantial time alone at the $200 price point and that $50 difference really matters. They'll move a lot of "boring" value cards, it's maybe not exciting for enthusiasts that want to see them push the envelope, but this looks like the best business move AMD has done in a long time.
I don't think their technology quite competes with Pascal but the leap from their last generation to this is huge, it's around Maxwell 2 class efficiency. Still it's in the realm of performance where I think nVidia will cash in on their advantage rather than try for the killing blow by reducing prices.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The only way you'd need to replace the card in 1-2 years is if you're pushing out 4k. More like 4-5 for 1080p As 66+% of people running games on Steam are still at 1080p with one or two monitors, with the vast majority of the rest being below that that it is a perfect price point to sell a shitload of cards.
So a tech site posts an article with a review about a new piece of tech and it's an ad?
No, but when they're obviously cherry picking facts to suit a pro-AMD narrative, people are justified in calling it an ad. I'm not even a video card enthusiast (I'm rockin' a Mac mini as my primary machine, so I have no horse in this race), but these immediately stood out as red flags to me:
- Boasting about just-launched products beating a two year-old products (GTX 970 was launched in September 2014) without making it clear that that's what the comparison was.
- Conveniently forgetting to mention that the competing product is already obsolete (the GTX 1070 launched three weeks ago).
- Trying to leave the impression that NVIDIA doesn't have a Pascal-based product on the market, even though they've had them out for almost two months now.
- Phrases like "as much as X% faster" when talking about performance.
- Switching the comparison to using previous-gen AMD cards (i.e. major energy hogs) rather than the competition when bragging about energy efficiency gains.
- Carefully selecting price points that let them pretend there's no elephant in the room: that AMD lacks a proper response to the 1070 and 1080.
I genuinely want AMD to do well, since I want a competitive ecosystem where they're all being pushed to do better, but this whole summary is so clearly one-sided that it's no surprise people view it as an ad.
I've been using AMD exclusively since the HD4850 and drivers haven't been an issue, just stay away from the beta drivers but that is true of pretty much every company. The new UI is quite nice, easy to set up custom profiles for specific games if you like (it makes a default profile the first time you launch a game so you simply pick the game you want under game settings, even loads the icon for each individual game which I thought was a nice touch) and all of the controls are well thought out and pretty self explanatory.
So if you want one of these cards I'd say go for it, the drivers are quite stable and I can't remember the last time I had an AMD driver issue, sadly now any issues are due to MSFT shitting out buggy patches for Windows 7. I'd get one for myself but frankly my R9 280 cranks out over 60fps (and in some cases over 100) in my games with so much purty I have to not gawk at the effects or I'll get myself killed while sitting there oohing and aahing at the particles and fire effects.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
- Carefully selecting price points that let them pretend there's no elephant in the room: that AMD lacks a proper response to the 1070 and 1080.
I genuinely want AMD to do well, since I want a competitive ecosystem where they're all being pushed to do better, but this whole summary is so clearly one-sided that it's no surprise people view it as an ad.
Funny - the cheapest 1070 is $120 more than the AMD card. That's over 50% more cost for a modest (20% ish) performance improvement. Considering that less than 5% (wheee lots of percentages here) of gamers buy a card that costs over 200 bucks (source: steam) I think you are being dishonest. Nvidia is the one that doesn't have a product to compare.
For someone who isn't a 'video card enthusiast' you sure did regurgitate the entirety of the Nvidia talking points against the competition though!
So, where you can find a 1070 for $300? The cheapest one in Newegg is $450, or 2 times the MSRP of the RX480... and thats almost one month after launch.
Not to mention that the 480 is NOT in the same price class as the 970, as the name implies, is the successor of the 380/380X and goes directly against the 960 and 1060. The fact that performance-wise is between the 970 and 980 (or 390/390X) at the same MRSP as the 380 is great news for everyone, specially for NVidia users that right now are being gouged left and right with those overinflated prices and the FE scam.
- Conveniently forgetting to mention that the competing product is already obsolete (the GTX 1070 launched three weeks ago).
- Carefully selecting price points that let them pretend there's no elephant in the room: that AMD lacks a proper response to the 1070 and 1080.
At $379/$449 it's a big step up in price from the $329 the GTX 970 launched at and way, way beyond the $199/$239 that AMD is charging. The GTX 970 now retails for ~$250 so in one sentence you lambast them for comparing to the closest competitor in price and then in the next sentence you complain about not comparing to a card that you yourself admit belongs in a completely different league? You're trolling for team green, comparing this card to the 1070 would be ridiculous. And if you wonder why they don't give hints or spoilers about the GTX 1060, it's because they're under NDA and that's exactly the sort of thing that's supposed to prevent. Until the NDA lifts it doesn't just have unknown price and performance, officially it doesn't exist. It's a review of the RX 480, not all the cards AMD chose not to make. Those who consider buying this card doesn't give a rat's ass about whether AMD has a 1070/1080 competitor or not, it's off-topic.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The 1070 costs ~$200 more an by your logic it's also obsolete because you could buy a 1080 instead (never mind you'll need to spend another ~$200 on top of that) which had launched prior to the 1070. Also, the 1080 launched at the end of May so I don't know where you're getting 2 months from.
Your comment is almost equally as misinformed so should we assume that it's an Nvidia ad?
As long as ATI drivers continue to be sketchy, my first choice will be Nvidia.
Well, that's the question, isn't it? ...
I don't see reviewers complaining about driver issues or rendering artifacts, I do see them commenting on the high performance for low price.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Tom's Hardware tested the power consumption of AMD's reference card and saw that could draw more power from both the motherboard and the 6-pin power connector than the PCI Express specification allows for either of them.
I would wait a while before this issue is resolved. Maybe the issue could be fixed with a driver update, in which case only benchmarks done after the driver update would matter.
Maybe a non-reference card will be released with an 8-pin power connector and better power distribution.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
UK will totally regret it when EU becomes a full fledged country with an unified army and start to attack all the countries they want included in.
These cards seem to work great with open source drivers on Linux. Check out the comparison between open source driver and Pro driver here: http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect/1606281-HA-RX480LINU80/54caad64cb9009a3376fea79c64da84e01d7e108
And two of these will blow away GTX 1080 at 1/4 of the price! And for 1/2 of the price of 1070!
On top of that, with the two cards, I can setup KVM with VGA passthrough and play games in KVM without ever rebooting into windows!
I am sick of having to install the damned proprietary driver and/or wait for the stupid new driver to get released when the kernel driver ABI or Xorg ABI changes.
I've been buying Nvidia cards for years, and I gotta say that this card is excellent. Anyone that is not a complete idiot will realize this.
Lets see:
- Open source drivers which means that I never have to worry about stupid proprietary crap again
- High performance per dollar
- You can buy 4 of them for price of 1 GTX 1080
- You can buy 2 of them for price of 1 GTX 1070
- With two cards I can setup KVM with VGA passthrough and play games in Linux
- Finally able to say "fuck nvidia"
Conclusion: I am buying 2 of these. Fuck Nvidia.
OK, I'm off-topic, but what's the best fanless video card? I want to run a 4k screen on my Linux box but don't care much about performance (no games) and want my machine to be quiet/silent.