AMD Radeon RX 480 (14nm Polaris)

[DanceswithUnix]

...matter that VRAM>system memory you mean? We've seen GPUs go from small co-processors to complex processors far bigger and more power hungry than the CPUs they're normally tied to so I suppose it's not unusual that their memory capacity has scaled similarly.

Yes that.

In the same way that in some older operating systems (BSD & SYS-V Unix, Windows XP) you should have more swap than ram. I know graphics drivers used to work much the same way, that textures etc expected to use RAM as a cache for what wouldn't fit in VRAM. Now as a victim cache I guess it wouldn't matter, but frankly I have no idea how modern Windows video drivers are designed.

But I guess if people expand old 4GB ram PCs with 8GB video cards then any problems will get reported fast enough

[watercooled]

As far as I know (and I could be completely wrong), I think modern systems do indeed treat RAM as a victim cache for VRAM so it shouldn't really matter which one is larger. It would make sense given how large VRAM is nowadays.

If you check active RAM usage, lots of games can easily fill more VRAM than system RAM.

[cheesemp]

Overclockers are reporting the Sapphire Nitro 480 has been delayed by 3 or 4 days due to a typhoon in Taiwan. Guess we'll have to wait a bit longer for custom card benchmarks...

[ultrasbm]

Vega 11 is what I'm holding out for now

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

More pictures of the AIB RX480 cards.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...ay_5pm/d5afieg

Updates:

PowerColor Devil series will have 1367mhz factory OC
HIS Roaring series will have 1342mhz factory OC
XFX Black series will have 1328mhz factory OC
There was no information about Sapphire Nitro factory OC.

Also non-reference cards will be in market ETA 7/27 (in Korea at least)

[DanceswithUnix]

So a 5% to 8% overclock? Not exactly earth shattering. Was hoping someone would hit 1400MHz.

[scaryjim]

So a 5% to 8% overclock? Not exactly earth shattering. Was hoping someone would hit 1400MHz.

Factory overclocks are often quite conservative though (particularly on AMD cards, for some reason), and the best overclocking results we've seen from reference boards were only 1450MHz under air. Besides, I suspect that core clock isn't going to be as important as memory clock for improving performance (Hexus got 10% more performance out of their reference board on a 5% core/10% memory overclock, suggesting the memory clock was contributing more to the increase). if we see those core clocks with reference 8000Gbps memory then I don't think we're going to see substantial performance gains. Can't help thinking that the 480 really needed GDDR5X...

[kalniel]

Yeah it's still a stonking OC for a warranty to cover given some reference boards are struggling to hit those kinds of speeds with any great amount of stability.

[Bagnaj97]

Can't help thinking that the 480 really needed GDDR5X...

Perhaps that's what this rumoured 490 is, if it exists at all?

[scaryjim]

Perhaps that's what this rumoured 490 is, if it exists at all?

That occurred to me literally as I was hitting the post button for my earlier comment, so I went off looking for any evidence online of AMD using GDDR5X. Came up blank, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. To me it looks like the best way of getting extra performance out of the RX 480, which seems to be bandwidth limited.

That said, the slides detailing AMD's naming convention list > 256bit memory as being one technical marker of the RX 490, which would mean a different GPU. I guess there might be a well hidden Polaris 12 out there with more shaders and a 384bit memory bus, but I dunno, seems unlikely. My first thought when I saw RX 490 was a dual-GPU card, and a few sites have come to the same conclusion, but I don't know about that; multi-GPU support seems to be getting more variable, although RotTR's recent patch gives an indication of what can be achieved by an invested developer, and MS's announcement of basic abstracted mGPU support in DX12 might make more developers inclined to support mGPU going forward. It'd be a bit of a risk if they decided to go that way, although there's no good technical reason they couldn't.

It's all clear as mud But I think one thing we can discount is the RX 490 being just a heavily overclocked RX 480. There's definitely something else coming. As to what, I guess only time will tell.

[watercooled]

There were rumours Vega10 has been brought forward, so maybe it's that?

[Xlucine]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...ay_5pm/d5afieg

I'm hopeful of much bigger improvements than predicted from a boost clock comparison:

The reason I'm more hopeful of quality AIB cards is because the reference board isn't good. If the game can really hammer the GPU then the engine core clock never hits 1,266MHz, quoted as the peak speed by AMD. I know this because of the following frequencies produced during the 3DMark Stress Test:

http://hexus.net/media/uploaded/2016...62370d0c5b.txt - it's about 100MHz off peak, because the temperature is hitting the default 80°C, and the GPU is scaling back. This is without increasing the board power. The effect is less prevalent in games, mind.

A quality Asus or Sapphire cooler ought to keep temps in check and allow the RX 480 GPU to hit its frequency stride more often.

We're down for getting one of the very first Sapphire own-designed cards in the next few days; its review scores will make for an interesting comparison.

ETA: I've said it before, but a dual 480 board under the 490 name would be unprecedented. Any improved 480s have the 480X and 485 names available, whereas the 490 has historically been a different GPU and the X95 name has been reserved for dual boards.

[DanceswithUnix]

ETA: I've said it before, but a dual 480 board under the 490 name would be unprecedented. Any improved 480s have the 480X and 485 names available, whereas the 490 has historically been a different GPU and the X95 name has been reserved for dual boards.

AMD's usual convention: 480X would be improved speed from existing chip, a 485 would be new silicon (eg the 285 was not the same chip as the 280).

But then they didn't call them RX before, so that could all change.

[Bagnaj97]

My first thought when I saw RX 490 was a dual-GPU card, and a few sites have come to the same conclusion, but I don't know about that; multi-GPU support seems to be getting more variable, although RotTR's recent patch gives an indication of what can be achieved by an invested developer, and MS's announcement of basic abstracted mGPU support in DX12 might make more developers inclined to support mGPU going forward. It'd be a bit of a risk if they decided to go that way, although there's no good technical reason they couldn't.

With Explicit Multi Adapter in DX12 and Vulkan, and the possibility of GPU-per-eye in VR, perhaps a dual-GPU card does make sense? CIV6 supports EMA and is an AMD sponsored title - a good showcase for a new dual-gpu card?

[scaryjim]

... ETA: I've said it before, but a dual 480 board under the 490 name would be unprecedented. Any improved 480s have the 480X and 485 names available, whereas the 490 has historically been a different GPU and the X95 name has been reserved for dual boards.

6970 -> 6990?
7970 -> 7990?

We're under a completely different naming scheme so you can't really rely on previous naming conventions, but AMD have done dual cards without 5s, Xes or X2s in the name. So the RX 490 being a dual GPU card would not be unprecedented.

AMD's usual convention: 480X would be improved speed from existing chip, a 485 would be new silicon (eg the 285 was not the same chip as the 280).

But then they didn't call them RX before, so that could all change.

I've posted the new naming convention slide a few times - according to AMD there won't be any X suffixes this generation. The first number is the generation (4), the second is the performance segment (8), the third is the revision - 0 for the first revision, and 5 for the second revision. So we might see an RX 485; we shouldn't see an RX 480X.

With Explicit Multi Adapter in DX12 and Vulkan, and the possibility of GPU-per-eye in VR, perhaps a dual-GPU card does make sense? CIV6 supports EMA and is an AMD sponsored title - a good showcase for a new dual-gpu card?

Civ 6 is the third recent development (after the MS abstraction new and the RotTR patch) to point to multi-GPU support still being relevant. If the industry decides that supporting multi-GPU is important on PC, it'll happen across the board; are you going to want to be the one developer whose AAA titles don't support multi-GPU?