Digital Foundry on AMD Polaris: Can 'R9 480'/'R9 480X' Dominate Mainstream PC Graphics?

[JEMC]

I don't have anything against Digital Foundry or the other tech sites that have reported those same things, and all that's said on that video is technically true, but... The problem is that all the conclusions taken from the leaked info don't take into consideration the conditions in which those benchmarks where made.

Were they engineering samples or retail chips? Where they running at full clock speeds or not? Were they using drivers that supported those new chips? We don't know, and all of that is important when it comes to know the real performance of a chip.

For example, at the Game Developers Conference, AMD briefly showed Polaris 10 running Hitman at 1440p at max settings with constant 60fps. That is something that only Fury X (from AMD cards) can do, yet we're being told that it will have R9 290X performance.

Also, assuming its performance based on the shaders and CU units is missleading. Take the recently announced GTX 1080, that features 2560 cores and yet it's alledgly more powerful than the GTX 980Ti or Titan X which have 2816 and 3072 cores respectively.

 

Now, I'm not trying to say that Polaris 10 will compete with the 1080, far from it, but just because it's "mainstream" it doesn't mean that it can't outperform the current cards.