AMD Fiji XT R9 390X Specs Leak – 4GB of 3D Stacked HBM and 4096 Stream Processors

[JEMC]

Bofferbrauer said:

JEMC said:
As a rumor is looks good (so a beast of a GPU), but why would AMD go with 4GB of VRAM when some current games are already asking for more?

AMD came up with new, vastly improved color and texture compression techniques, which results in less memory needs. It's the reason why AMDs Radean HD 285 only have 2GiB of RAM while the 280, which it intends to replace, had 3.

Another reason could be practical: HBM is a new, not yet fully proven technology and pretty much unknown yield rates. Had they put 8 GiB onto the Graphics Cards, they might not have enough of them at the time of the scheduled release. 4 GiB is still a good compromise, and like I said, AMDs new compression technologies should alleviate the problem quite a bit.

Besides, just like the 290X lately, I'm pretty sure there will be Versions later on with double as much RAM as the normal Version

Yeahm that is true.

But as I said, it's kind of sad to see them missing the change to go with more VRAM because they could attrack not only AMD fans or serial upgraders that go with whatever the fastest card is when they upgrade, but also get onboard those who fear that 4GB is not enough, not even at 4K but at lower resolutions with game developers asking 6GB to use the highest quality textures.

And no matter what "magic" works behind the scenes to make better use of memory, if the game is coded to "need" X amount of RAM, you either have it and can play at the highest settings or you don't have it and have to accept that the top of the line GPU that you just bought will "only" be able to run those games on High.

And that mentality is the one that could make AMD win more sales.