Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Pemalite said:

The entire 300 series was rebadges though with Fury added on top as a "Halo" product and a test vehicle for mass produced HBM and Nano reserved for a more Niche' market.

The 390 and 390X were just re-badged Radeon R9 290 and 290X parts with the bulk of the 200 series being rebadged 7000 parts.

AMD has just stagnated, not just in terms of rebadged hardware, but also prices and that reflected in their marketshare, they are turning that around... But it will sadly take another couple of years to see the fruits of AMD's new strategy.
Even the 400 series will likely be derived by a substantual amount of rebadged hardware, especially in the low-end.

If Vega doesn't launch untill next year, it might not launch under the 400 series lineup, but rather the 500 series instead, with Polaris and general GCN 1.0/1.1/1.2 rebadges.

[...]

Well, it goes without saying that there will be some refinement in production as time goes on that should result in some reduction in power consumption after a few revisions.
But it's not going to be anything significant...

For something more significant AMD will likely need to do another respin and that won't happen for a long time yet, if ever.
Basically the best refinement we can except is from custom cards.

Alby_da_Wolf said:

 

About APUs, I wasn't precise, I should have written the use of the latest AMD GPU cores in them, and not literally putting a 460 in a Zen APU, but simply putting the GPU power of a 460, obtained with the latest cores available, in it. Yes, a sideport for GDDR could be a nice idea to avoid wasting the GPU power of the  higher-end APUs, although faster DDR4, and organised in quad- or even better eight-channel architecture, could at least mitigate the problem.

Quad-Channel and Octo-Channel carry with it increased costs due to a substantual jump in PCB traces required, which means more PCB layers and thus more engineering to route everything properly.
It's not gonna' happen. :P Not in a consumer-grade APU anyway.

DDR4 and the bandwidth saving technology AMD has implemented in GCN 1.3/4.0 will help, but it's not going to allow you to have high-end GPU performance, mid-range maybe. Low-end certainly.

Alby_da_Wolf said:

 

About drivers and games, thanks for all the explanations, my doubts come from the existence of games that cannot use more than one GPU, or cannot without giving more problems than benefits, maybe it could be possible to transparently offer them at least part of all the benefits offered by multiple GPU with APIs that keep where it should be stuff that is at a level low enough to be better managed by those that designed the HW than by game devs.

That is where Microsoft is taking Direct X 12. Game developers can build their games to support their own multi-GPU implementation, this is what nVidia has backed when it comes to SLI support for more than 2 cards in games.

But... Leaving it in the hands of developers means it's never going to catch on considering that the vast majority of PC's use a single GPU and consoles all use a Single GPU, it's a waste of resources.

At the moment though if you want more than 2 GPU's for gaming, AMD is where it is at.

First of all, about all the rest, and other, thanks a lot to you two, Pemalite and JEMC, you always give a lot of useful news, infos and tech details.

About quad- and octo-channel DDR4, quad should become mid-upper mainstream quite soon, while octo will be high-end PC, server and workstation tech for a while, but I would still consider it, AMD is planning also new high-end APUs, that it will sell both as plain PC APUs and as Opteron ones, quite likely ASUS and many others will make not only expensive high-end and high overclock-ready mobos, but also well equipped mid/high-end ones at a reasonable overprice compared to average ones, in 2000 and 2004 for example ASUS was still a lot more expensive than average competitors, too much for cheap PCs, but already in 2009 I was able to choose it for very few tens euros overprice compared to others.

About drivers, I hope the resistance of half a billion users to Win 10, plus the growth of a huge Windows-free market outside of PCs wil push game devs to support again more OpenGL, and obviously Vulkan is welcome too.

JEMC said:

Take the following with a pinch of salt:

[...]

AMD Radeon RX 460 – The Ultimate Low Power eSports Card

The Radeon RX 460 replaces the Radeon R7 260 and Radeon R7 360 series cards. This card features 896 stream processors which deliver around 2 TFLOPs of compute performance. The card comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM which is due to its low-cost and eSports focused nature. The card has been designed to deliver best experience in MOBA and eSports titles. In comparisons made by AMD, they test the Radeon RX 460 against an R7 260X at same settings on 1080p resolution.

[...]

Maybe AMD still has some things to fix not only in its high-end, but also in mid/high-end strategy, but surely it's gonna give the mid and mid/low-range very interesting value for money.