If i would not choose a fury nano, would a Tonga based gfx card not the best option ?

[William Gaatjes]

Hi, i have a monitor resolution of 1920 * 1080.
I would like to play the games i have with this resolution.

After reading about fury nano, that card seems promising but might be a bit expensive when keeping in mind that a fury nano may be overkill. I am not planning to upgrade my monitor soon. And when i buy a big tv screen, it would "just" be full hd also. No 4K screen for me.

So, i have been reading about the different gcn versions and it seems to me that the Tonga gpu has the most features. It is before fiji the latest gcn version : 1.2. This would mean also that it will also have more DX12 features when compared to previous gcn versions, yes ?
If i would buy a Tonga based gfx card, i can buy a 2GB and a 4GB model. The 4GB model is only 35 euro more expensive.
I would then be better of with a R9 380 or R9 285. Also because of my 380W PSU.

What i do not understand, why would AMD push the older GCN cores more ?
Why would they not come with a Tonga core that allows more headroom in the clock department ?
Would it not make more sense that the fastest AMD card after fiji would be Tonga ?

What do you guys and gals think ? A Tonga based gfx card would be my best option. I can buy a 4GB model for ~250 euros at this moment but i am still looking around.

 

[Kenmitch]

1080P @60Hz?

1080P to 4K not much price difference these days....Unless shopping cheap TV's.

 

[Seba]

Either upgrade that 380 watt power supply, or better choose a GTX 960 2GB instead of a R9 380 card.

 

[Headfoot]

depending on processor you could run a 380 on a good quality 380w supply. Modern non-OC Haswell + 380 4GB would certainly be ok on quality brand 380w.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Either upgrade that 380 watt power supply, or better choose a GTX 960 2GB instead of a R9 380 card.

If i would buy one, i will need one with 4GB. Will be a bit more expensive but at least it has a Maxwell core. But before i decide, i will check how well it does. It has only a 128Bit memory bus but does come in 2GB and 4GB variants. 112GB/sec. The R9 380 i am interested in has 179GB/sec and 4GB of memory. Both cards have delta color compression.
I read that the R9 285 is as fast as the R9 280. Yet when looking through some reviews, The R9 280 has more fps. The R9 380 is the same chip as R9 285. The GTX960 uses a lot less power it seems according to some articles.
I will have to do a full read up on several reviews first.
I have had an AMD cpu before coupled with an Nvidia graphics card. I hope this has not become an issue these days... Coupling products of the two adversaries...

depending on processor you could run a 380 on a good quality 380w supply. Modern non-OC Haswell + 380 4GB would certainly be ok on quality brand 380w.

I have an AMD system. A10-6700 richland with 8GB of 1600MHz memory.
It is a 65W tdp APU but i will disable the iGPU of the APU.
I did notice that 4 threads at 4.3GHz consumes a bit more than that 65Wtdp (with iGPU enabled as well).

 

[railven]

As a new convert to downscaling, you don't have to get stuck on 1080p as your resolution unless it's a budget decision.

I got a 1440p monitor but run some of my games at 2160p.

Girlfriend has a 1080p monitor but runs her games at 1440p some even at 2160p.

To me it looks way better at 2160p down to 1440p than 1440p w8/MSAA. Performance hit is greater, but what I mean is, it's only overkill if you don't put the extra GPU resources to good use.

 

[William Gaatjes]

As a new convert to downscaling, you don't have to get stuck on 1080p as your resolution unless it's a budget decision.

I got a 1440p monitor but run some of my games at 2160p.

Girlfriend has a 1080p monitor but runs her games at 1440p some even at 2160p.

To me it looks way better at 2160p down to 1440p than 1440p w8/MSAA. Performance hit is greater, but what I mean is, it's only overkill if you don't put the extra GPU resources to good use.

Strange, when the native resolution of my monitor is 1920 * 1080...
I do not see the use of a higher resolution since the monitor cannot display it. Details would just disappear.
Besides, the monitor provides the pc with the maximum resolution it can display. Any higher might cause the monitor to go blank and display an error message. My highest resolution allowed in the CCC is the native resolution of my monitor.

 

[wilds]

Perhaps a GTX 970 may be a better fit for your system. AMD and Nvidia both allow resolution to be scaled up. VSR for AMD, DSR for Nvidia. A 4GB GTX 960 may be alright for you, but it is quite expensive especially when compared to the next performance tier up.

AMD's R9 285, R9 380 series, and R9 Fury series support 4k VSR on a 1080p display. (GCN 1.2)

 

[poofyhairguy]

Strange, when the native resolution of my monitor is 1920 * 1080...
I do not see the use of a higher resolution since the monitor cannot display it. Details would just disappear.

It is basically another form of AA.

 

[railven]

Strange, when the native resolution of my monitor is 1920 * 1080...
I do not see the use of a higher resolution since the monitor cannot display it. Details would just disappear.
Besides, the monitor provides the pc with the maximum resolution it can display. Any higher might cause the monitor to go blank and display an error message. My highest resolution allowed in the CCC is the native resolution of my monitor.

Punch out time!

Here is the tech I'm referring to:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/vsr

VSR allows games to render at higher resolutions (up to 4K; see the ‘Virtual Super Resolution Support’ table, below) and then rescales them down to a lower native display resolution. Using this, you can get quality that rivals up to 4K, even on a 1080p display while playing your favorite games.

Basically, saying don't let your current screen be your draw back. Unless it's budget which I can understand.

As someone who is playing a lot of console ports from last gen, 150% resolution is beautiful!

 

[Elixer]

What i do not understand, why would AMD push the older GCN cores more ?
Why would they not come with a Tonga core that allows more headroom in the clock department ?
Would it not make more sense that the fastest AMD card after fiji would be Tonga ?

What do you guys and gals think ? A Tonga based gfx card would be my best option. I can buy a 4GB model for ~250 euros at this moment but i am still looking around.

GCN 1.2 has improvements over GCN 1.1 & 1.0 (http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn..../07/AMD_GCN3_Instruction_Set_Architecture.pdf), but, the problem here is, that AMD has yet to release a full Tonga core for whatever reason. Rumor says that they are saving these for Apple.
We could possibly see a R385 full tonga, but, who knows.

It would seem to be more logical to have your new lineup be all GCN 1.2, but, nobody knows why that isn't the case except for AMD.

So, while the tessellation is improved in tonga, the R285 & R380 cards aren't the full tonga, so they are slower than the 290/390 overall.
I am sure lots of people will want to see what a full tonga is capable of.

This don't help you though, and, the answer to your question is, buy the best video card you can afford.

 

[TheProgrammer]

OP, you are correct. Get the R9 380. It's the best VPU on the market at this time for price/performance/features and future capability.
$200USD is the sweet spot for price/performance. See Tom's recommendation at $199. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-4.html

Also, Freesync > the competition's variable vsync solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzHxhjcE0eQ

You want GCN (any version) if you're planning on going for a VR headset in 6-12months. The cheapest, best option if you need a card TODAY for 1080P is the R9 380. Add a 2nd one in Crossfire when you buy a VR headset. Not only the best value, but definitely better than any competitor's option for VR in price/performance.

This is my personal heirarchy of what I'd buy for myself in today's market-

Non-VR 1080P gaming on mainsteam games: Intel Iris 6200. Currently the Broadwell 5775C & 5675C APUs on desktop. This will do 1080P at mid to low settings, and high settings in mainstream games. Nice integrated setup. This is also a good choice if you do mainstream (Twitch.tv top 10, Steam top 10, Minecraft, LoL) gaming, or more Linux gaming. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-6.html
Best value non-VR today / best Crossfire VR value tomorrow: R9 380. Best card on the market today. $199 gets you 1080/1440 performance levels with everything, and very long legs going into the future.
Best single card VR / ultimate performance Crossfire VR tomorrow: Sapphire Fury

To put that in perspective, the Sapphire Tri-X under a gaming workload is as loud as the GTX 980 Ti is at idle. Simply put, these results are amazing.

http://anandtech.com/show/9421/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-review-feat-sapphire-asus/17
The press is being very "low key" about the sheer awesomeness of Fiji (which will absolutely blast off with VR, like all GCN cards) as per the usual AMD treatment. Like the 5870 launch, mum is the word on how great the card really is. If you remember that launch everyone said "wait for Fermi". LOL. But regardless of these bought-and-paid-for-shill review sites... Fury is the way to go.

Don't wait for anything from the competition, unless you want the lolz.. buy GCN, you'll be better off by a longshot.

Intel and AMD have everything anyone needs. There's no real option for any competitor's discrete cards to be considered at this point with Crystalwell, the 300 series and Fury lineup. Intel has a nice solution for mainstream gamers with the Iris 6200 and for VR the competitor's architecture is inferior to GCN (which has been around for YEARS).

I personally am using an R9 380 at the moment. I disagree with the sentiment that you should only buy the best card you can afford.

I CAN afford a Fury X.. but I do not think that is the best choice. The problem with the >$200/R9 380 market right now, is that they are grossly overpowered for the Steam top 10 list (games people actually play) at 1080P, yet not powerful enough to ideally do 4K gaming or VR with a single card.

Thus, I would use an Intel Crystalwell chip if you're building now and want to wait and see on VR. Or, in an existing rig buy an R9 380 for $199.
If you want to step up to there and get something beyond Oculus' R9 290 VR recommendation, get the new Sapphire Fury. Amazing piece of card.

Now all that said, the R9 390(x) cards are still great. You can't go wrong with GCN from top to bottom, from GCN "1.0" to GCN "1.2". They're all better than the competitions architecture for VR.

In summary: you were on the right track. You obviously know what you're buying and not just fooled by marketing nonsense, or you wouldn't be here in the AMD subforum.
I'm assuming you're essentially looking for something like the Sapphire R9 380 4GB which can be found online for $220USD. Not sure on pricing in the EU. I personally would just go for the 2GB but 4 can't hurt.

 

[el etro]

~400W PSU is fine to go with a R9 285/R9 380 card, just make sure you don't have to use a lot of adapters to plug the power connections of the card.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Punch out time!

Here is the tech I'm referring to:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/vsr



Basically, saying don't let your current screen be your draw back. Unless it's budget which I can understand.

As someone who is playing a lot of console ports from last gen, 150% resolution is beautiful!

I feel that VSR (Virtual Super Resolution) is just another name for supersampling, an anti aliasing method.
A method to calculate the image at a higher resolution and then perform anti aliasing and then downscale the image to the desired resolution. That is all that VSR is.
Anti aliasing is just that you take the rgb value from the surrounding pixels of a given pixel and calculate an average rgb value for that pixel ( and surrounding pixels).
But since VSR is possible, that would mean that the other forms of anti aliasing are no longer needed.

I feel this is a marketing gimmick to sell the fury because it is supposed to be a 4K card but a lot of gamers do not have 4K screens. Thus, to justify the price, a very hardware taxing form of anti aliasing is sold as something special. I wonder what is the use since all games have various anti aliasing methods to choose from. These would then be no longer needed.

 

[William Gaatjes]

It is basically another form of AA.

Sorry, overlooked your post, i agree with you.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Perhaps a GTX 970 may be a better fit for your system. AMD and Nvidia both allow resolution to be scaled up. VSR for AMD, DSR for Nvidia. A 4GB GTX 960 may be alright for you, but it is quite expensive especially when compared to the next performance tier up.

AMD's R9 285, R9 380 series, and R9 Fury series support 4k VSR on a 1080p display. (GCN 1.2)

I see. DSR for Nvidia, VSR for AMD.

A GTX970 sure is interesting , but it is also 120 euro more expensive when compared to a R9 380 4GB.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I also have hopes that one day i can use my apu gpu for physics and the discrete gpu for graphics. But that is and will remain a dream, i am afraid. The A10-6700 does not even have the unified memory option where data is not copied form cpu memory to gpu memory but that just pointers are passed or that the MMU makes a region of memory space the same for both cpu and gpu. I have not looked in detail how they do it. But that HSA feature sure is interesting.

 

[Headfoot]

I have an AMD system. A10-6700 richland with 8GB of 1600MHz memory.
It is a 65W tdp APU but i will disable the iGPU of the APU.
I did notice that 4 threads at 4.3GHz consumes a bit more than that 65Wtdp (with iGPU enabled as well).

What brand power supply? 380 in a good brand will be enough power for your system as long as you dont have a ton of fans and hard drives running too

 

[William Gaatjes]

What brand power supply? 380 in a good brand will be enough power for your system as long as you dont have a ton of fans and hard drives running too

I have this model : Antec EarthWatts EA 380D Green 380W

I bought it based on this review :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3902/antec-earthwatts-ea-380d-green-380w

And it is a fine PSU.


From another thread :

Specs of my system :
4 fans : 1 CPU fan, 1 PSU fan, 2 case fans.
PSU : Antec Earth watts 380W.
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
SSD : Crucial_CT256M550SSD1 : 256,0 GB
HDD : WDC WD5000AAKX-00ERMA0 : 500,1 GB.
DVD writer : Optiarc.
RAM : 8GB 1600MHz ddr3 dram.
MB : GA-F2A75M-HD2
APU : A10-6700.

All power is measured on the 230V inlet with a voltcraft Energy check 3000.
Idle power consumption is 34.4W @ 230V.
Having a firefox browser open with 1 open tab with anandtech forum is 36.1W. When opening explorer, power consumption jumps up to 41W for a second and then returns to idle.
Four threads, prime 95 is 127.6W @4,2GHz auto overclock from AMD.
When it starts throtteling the clock speed, powerconsumption is lowered to around 118W.

 

[railven]

I feel that VSR (Virtual Super Resolution) is just another name for supersampling, an anti aliasing method.
A method to calculate the image at a higher resolution and then perform anti aliasing and then downscale the image to the desired resolution. That is all that VSR is.
Anti aliasing is just that you take the rgb value from the surrounding pixels of a given pixel and calculate an average rgb value for that pixel ( and surrounding pixels).
But since VSR is possible, that would mean that the other forms of anti aliasing are no longer needed.

I feel this is a marketing gimmick to sell the fury because it is supposed to be a 4K card but a lot of gamers do not have 4K screens. Thus, to justify the price, a very hardware taxing form of anti aliasing is sold as something special. I wonder what is the use since all games have various anti aliasing methods to choose from. These would then be no longer needed.

Well, yeah, no one said it was anything different. But not all games support SSAA, and from my recollection you couldn't make custom AMD resolutions without third party tools.

Also, SSAA is the best form of AA, in my opinion, why I said don't limit yourself by your screen resolution unless it's a budget issue.

For example: My GF has a 1080p monitor, but I'd buy her a Fury X/980 Ti if she wanted a new GPU. You'd say it be overkill for her resolution, I say it will last longer in regards to processing power and in the interim games she plays alot of benefit from DSR/VSR features.

Just different ways to use your cards I guess.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, yeah, no one said it was anything different. But not all games support SSAA, and from my recollection you couldn't make custom AMD resolutions without third party tools.

Also, SSAA is the best form of AA, in my opinion, why I said don't limit yourself by your screen resolution unless it's a budget issue.

For example: My GF has a 1080p monitor, but I'd buy her a Fury X/980 Ti if she wanted a new GPU. You'd say it be overkill for her resolution, I say it will last longer in regards to processing power and in the interim games she plays alot of benefit from DSR/VSR features.

Just different ways to use your cards I guess.

It is true. If you buy a fury or 980ti now, you can use the VSR/DSR feature on your 1080 screen. When you make the transition to a 4K screen, you can no longer use VSR or DSR but you probably will not need that anyway at 4K. (Unless you got a 4K projector and a huge projection screen. )

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, just read about the GTX970. Interesting read about that memory segmentation because one connection of the crossbar is shared between two memory controllers, ending up instead of 8 with 7+1.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

I will for now wait a little more and see what the R9 -380 does with driver updates... I do not know when fury nano will appear and what the price will be. I think a R9 380 4GB would be a good choice.

 

[tential]

It is true. If you buy a fury or 980ti now, you can use the VSR/DSR feature on your 1080 screen. When you make the transition to a 4K screen, you can no longer use VSR or DSR but you probably will not need that anyway at 4K. (Unless you got a 4K projector and a huge projection screen. )

At 4k if you still need aa then you're just really picky and sensitive (so people in forums and enthusiasts). I doubt we'll see people worry as much about aa at 4k.

For me on my projector on a small 80 inch screen I use vsr and am happy maybe if I stop using the small screen and get a new 100+ inch screen I'd think differently though.
4k projector is the dream but sadly costs need to dip below 3000 for me. Then at that point 4k us a requirement not a luxury. For now as long as only tvs are affordable it's a luxury since 80+ inch tvs get super expensive and I don't want a 70 incher anymore.

 

[William Gaatjes]

At 4k if you still need aa then you're just really picky and sensitive (so people in forums and enthusiasts). I doubt we'll see people worry as much about aa at 4k.

For me on my projector on a small 80 inch screen I use vsr and am happy maybe if I stop using the small screen and get a new 100+ inch screen I'd think differently though.
4k projector is the dream but sadly costs need to dip below 3000 for me. Then at that point 4k us a requirement not a luxury. For now as long as only tvs are affordable it's a luxury since 80+ inch tvs get super expensive and I don't want a 70 incher anymore.

Yeah. With a huge projection screen i mean theater proportions. Used to work in the audio video business for a few years. The biggest screen the biggest projector supported was 27 feet by 20 feet. Now that is a big screen for a home. You need a mansion for that. Maybe at that size AA becomes useful again. I do not know. I forgot what the resolution is of current digital cinema projectors.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I noticed, i have only one 6 pin PCIe power connector. I will need to get a converter cable when i finally buy a new gfx card.

This website sure helps out :

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnectors/connectors.html