AMD's New Radeons Revisit Old Silicon, Enable Dormant Features 75
crookedvulture writes "The first reviews of AMD's Radeon R7 and R9 graphics cards have hit the web, revealing cards based on the same GPU technology used in the existing HD 7000 series. The R9 280X is basically a tweaked variant of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz priced at $300 instead of $400, while the R9 270X is a revised version of the Radeon HD 7870 for $200. Thanks largely to lower prices, the R9 models compare favorably to rival GeForce offerings, even if there's nothing exciting going on at the chip level. There's more intrigue with the Radeon R7 260X, which shares the same GPU silicon as the HD 7790 for only $140. Turns out that graphics chip has some secret functionality that's been exposed by the R7 260X, including advanced shaders, simplified multimonitor support, and a TrueAudio DSP block dedicated to audio processing. AMD's current drivers support the shaders and multimonitor mojo in the 7790 right now, and a future update promises to unlock the DSP. The R7 260X isn't nearly as appealing as the R9 cards, though. It's slower overall than not only GeForce 650 Ti Boost cards from Nvidia, but also AMD's own Radeon HD 7850 1GB. We're still waiting on the Radeon R9 290X, which will be the first graphics card based on AMD's next-gen Hawaii GPU."
More reviews available from AnandTech, Hexus, Hot Hardware, and PC Perspective.
Re:Do the kids still chase the newest video card? (Score:5, Informative)
Or have we reached a diminishing return point and/or a point where money is being spent elsewhere (consoles, mobile, tablets, etc)?
The problem is that PC games have been cripppled for years by being developed on consoles and ported to PCs. Some do take advantage of the extra power of PC GPUs, but the majority will run fine on a GPU that's several years old, because it's more powerful than the crap in the consoles.
Re:Marketing Numbers (Score:5, Informative)
because there already is a 8000 series, which is a rebadge of the 7000 series. They rebadged so much that they ran out of numbers
Re:Do the kids still chase the newest video card? (Score:0, Informative)
My ass. PC games are notoriously unoptimized because you can throw more hardware at the problem.
Graphics APIs these days are basically just a way of get shaders into the GPU. Odds are, pretty much the same shaders are running on the PC as the console, so there's no room to 'unoptimize' them.
And, on the CPU side, I rarely see mine more than 20% used when playing games. So they're not 'unoptimized' there, either.
Plenty of games can be CPU bound, Planetside 2 is a free download.
Far Cry 3 runs like ass with my GTX 690, and for what... I have to dial it down to sub-skyrim, sub-BF3 graphics to hear the game over my system fans.
Ram is cheap, so you don't run into system memory limitations much anymore, but that doesn't mean games make tremendously efficient use of what's available.
How about this, PC software - in general - tends to make poor use of available resources of ALL kinds.
Here's an example I just found.
I spin up Big Picture mode in steam on my old iMac, and it defaults into 720p resolution - because...
When I select 1080p, it warns that my video card 'only' has 512mb of video memory (but does let me continue).
Why.... who in their right mind decided they need THAT much memory to render their UI in 1080p.
Have you seen Big Picture mode? How many textures need to be on screen at once? I know what they did, "all video cards made after 20XX have more than XXX MB of memory, so target that". That's FINE, but if you DOUBLED the PS3 or 360's graphics memory to 512MB, you would see FAR better use of it than Big Picture mode's UI demonstrates.
My main point is that higher PC specs do not get you 1:1 increase in features over console specs because it's not worth the effort to make efficient use of PC resources when slightly faster ones come out every month.
Re:Marketing Numbers (Score:5, Informative)
ATI/AMD has actually been consistent for several years now - they're literally just-now changing their scheme
The old system was a four-digit number. First digit is generation - a 7950 is newer than a 6870, and way newer than a 4830 or a 2600. The next two digits are how powerful it is within the generation - roughly, the second digit is the market segment, and the third is which model within that segment, but that's rough. They did tend to inflate numbers over time - the top-end single-GPU cards of each generation were the 2900 XT, the 3870, the 4890, the 5870, the 6970, and the 7970GE. Put simply, if you sort by the middle two digits within a generation, you also order by both power and price.
The fourth digit is always a zero. Always. I don't know why they bother.
Sometimes there's a suffix. "X2" used to mean it's a dual-GPU card, cramming two processors onto one board, but now those get a separate model number (they also only do that for the top GPU now, because they've found it's not worth it to use two weaker processors). "GE" or "Gigahertz Edition" was used on some 7xxx models, because Nvidia beat them pretty heavily with their 6xx series release so AMD had to rush out some cards that were essentially overclocked high enough to beat them. "Eyefinity Edition" used to be a thing, mainly it just meant it had a shitload of mini-DP outputs so you could do 3x2 six-monitor surround setups, which AMD was (and is) trying to push. And there were some "Pro" or "XT" models early on, but those were not significant.
Now forget all that, because they're throwing a new one out.
It's now a two-part thing, rather like what Intel does with their CPUs. "R9" is their "Enthusiast" series, for people with too much money. Within that, you have six models: the 270, 270X, 280, 280X, 290 and 290X. They haven't fully clarified things, but it seems that the X models are the "full" chip, while the non-X model has some cores binned off and slightly lower clocks. Other than that, it's a fairly straightforward list - the 290 beats the 280X beats the 280 beats the 270X and so on. Under those are the "R7" "gamer" series, which so far has the 240 through 260X, and an R5 230 model is listed on Wikipedia even though I've not seen it mentioned elsewhere.
Sadly, it's still a bit more complicated. See, some of the "new" ones are just the old ones relabeled. They're all the same fundamental "Graphics Core Next" architecture, but some of them have the new audio DSP stuff people are excited about. And it's not even a simple "everything under this is an old one lacking new features" - the 290X and 260X have the new stuff, but the 280X and 270X do not. And it gets worse still, because the 260X actually is a rebadge, it's just that they're enabling some hardware functionality now (the 290X actually is a genuine new chip as far as anyone can tell). So far, everything is 2__, so I would assume the first digit in this case is still the generation.
Oh, and there actually are some 8xxx series cards. There were some mobile models released (forgot to mention - an M suffix means mobile, and you can't directly compare numbers between them. A 7870 and 7870M are not the same.), and it looks like some OEM-only models on the desktop.
But yeah, it is a bit daunting at first, especially since they're transitioning to a new schema very abruptly (people were expecting an 8xxx and 9xxx series before a new schema). But not much has really changed - you just need to figure out which number is the generation, and which is the market segment, and you're good.
Re:Do the kids still chase the newest video card? (Score:4, Informative)
no, they support, not require