Polaris Refresh (RX 500 Series) Rumors

[happy medium]

Rather underwhelming release, but the 570 looks like it will be the Polaris card to get. The gains over the 470 more or less put it above the 480 in performance, no?

About 3% slower but close.

 

[tamz_msc]

On the plus side, clock speeds are much more consistent. On the RX 480 you had to play with voltage, power limit, and custom p-states to achieve a consistent clock speed.

 

[railven]

Wow. Using the MSI Gaming 480 (what I believe many here considered a power hungry card) and comparing it to the Nitro+ (since TPU doesn't have same brand cards), the 580 uses over 20W more than the Gaming X 480, which itself used over 30W more than the ref 480. And the performance summary @1080p is horrendous.

Whatever AMD's marketing plan is, good luck.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

Wow. Using the MSI Gaming 480 (what I believe many here considered a power hungry card) and comparing it to the Nitro+ (since TPU doesn't have same brand cards), the 580 uses over 20W more than the Gaming X 480, which itself used over 30W more than the ref 480. And the performance summary @1080p is horrendous.

Whatever AMD's marketing plan is, good luck.

No one cares about power consumption. Well, maybe someone looking to build one of those tiny case PCs, SFF?, but they aren't going to want one of these cards for that anyways.

 

[Headfoot]

So its the same chip with normal process improvements and some BIOS tweaks. Totally forgettable. This should have been 485 and 475. Rebranding to 580 and 570 is outright misleading. This is a bad practice and should not be encouraged by any vendor.

 

[IEC]

Wow. Using the MSI Gaming 480 (what I believe many here considered a power hungry card) and comparing it to the Nitro+ (since TPU doesn't have same brand cards), the 580 uses over 20W more than the Gaming X 480, which itself used over 30W more than the ref 480. And the performance summary @1080p is horrendous.

Whatever AMD's marketing plan is, good luck.

I doubt they have more than a skeleton marketing crew, having cut mostly from admin and marketing positions when they were bleeding money. They kept their money focused on R&D, which definitely paid off for Ryzen. We'll see if they can deliver similarly with Vega.

Obviously for those of us at the high-end, none of the Polaris lineup is appealing. However, I don't think AMD had any other hand to play. As a thought experiment, let's consider the potential options for RTG/AMD and likely outcomes:

1) Don't rebrand. Early batch RX480 reference cards continue to be used as the reference point for Polaris performance. Hot, noisy, throttling. Customer perception of the cards remains the same.
2) Rebrand, but optimize for a 10-20W power savings over the RX4xx series. People pan the performance of the cards, saying it offers nothing over the RX4xx series, and the power difference is largely ignored.
3) Rebrand, but optimize for stable boost clocks at or exceeding previous maximum out-of-the-box boost clocks of the RX4xx series. The cards offer something tangible over the RX4xx series, and the lack of a reference design forces a realignment of benchmarks.

Given the limitations of the Polaris architecture and the 14LPP process, expecting RTG/AMD to deliver high-end performance in a volume mainstream card is unrealistic. I still expect good deals on Polaris cards (whether RX4xx or RX5xx flavor) will move a lot of consumers to purchase. Simply because the cost of entry is good (especially with RX4xx series, or the new RX570 and RX560 cards) and I'd expect performance per dollar (the #1 metric in mainstream/budget cards) to go squarely in Polaris' favor, as it has for most of the past six months.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

So its the same chip with normal process improvements and some BIOS tweaks. Totally forgettable. This should have been 485 and 475. Rebranding to 580 and 570 is outright misleading. This is a bad practice and should not be encouraged by any vendor.

Who is being mislead? The only people I can think of is an uninformed buyer that already has a 480/1060, and buys a 580. That doesn't seem like a huge problem to me...

This is the same as a 480 as much as kabylake is the same as skylake. I will bet you weren't concerned for the consumers being mislead over kabylake though.

These posts reek of concern trolling. The people that didn't care about the market at all are now very worried for the consumers. Yah, I am not buying it...

 

[Headfoot]

Who is being mislead? The only people I can think of is an uninformed buyer that already has a 480/1060, and buys a 580. That doesn't seem like a huge problem to me...

These posts reek of concern trolling. The people that didn't care about the market at all are now very worried for the consumers. Yah, I am not buying it...

Funny that you should mention trolling...

 

[tential]

Who is being mislead? The only people I can think of is an uninformed buyer that already has a 480/1060, and buys a 580. That doesn't seem like a huge problem to me...

This is the same as a 480 as much as kabylake is the same as skylake. I will bet you weren't concerned for the consumers being mislead over kabylake though.

These posts reek of concern trolling. The people that didn't care about the market at all are now very worried for the consumers. Yah, I am not buying it...

Just typical forum warriors having zero idea how business works. What can you do. This is why I take business discussions on a technical forum.

 

[HurleyBird]

The new reference cooler seems like a surprising improvement. Besides that, a mediocre showing.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

Just typical forum warriors having zero idea how business works. What can you do. This is why I take business discussions on a technical forum.

Looks like old timer projection to me.

AMD released new cards for their new CPUs to show people how good the 4xx series really was, and to remove those terrible 480 reference card benchmarks. They didn't want to name it 485, because they wanted to mislead people into thinking it's a new generation with considerable improvements in performane.

This is a good business move by AMD, and the odds of anyone being hurt by this rebrand are minimal. I am not thrilled about personally, but I think the potential damage is being overblown.

You can look at my old posts. I told you that power consumption would increase, that the price would mirror the 480 release, and that performance gains would be marginal. I have also spoken out against AMD's deceptive marketing in the past too.

 

[tential]

And here folks we see the difference between an optimist, who i'm sure will get called an AMD fanboy;



And a pessimist, who i'm sure will get called an Nvidia fanboy.



What we really have, is both of these scenarios. The Rx580 competes with the GTX1060, is a good card for the midrange, and will be great alongside those Ryzen 5's. However it does draw more power than stock Rx480's and until the price of the Rx5 series drops, or the Rx4 series rises, it will be hard to recommend the Rx470/480 over the rx570/580 unless you care about absolute performance within your price range.

Interested to see what the fully unlocked Rx560 does however.

And now we resume the wait for Vega.

Post should be commended. +10 for you good sir.

 

[tential]

Looks like old timer projection to me.

AMD released new cards for their new CPUs to show people how good the 4xx series really was, and to remove those terrible 480 reference card benchmarks.

You can look at my old posts. I told you that power consumption would increase, that the price would mirror the 480 release, and that performance gains would be marginal.

It's sad people don't get any of this.

Although the main thing I was looking at with the 580 was how good of a process improvement has occurred since the 480 since that may give some insight into whether Vega will be held back by glofo or not. At the end of the day one of the major reasons I have zero faith in amd is the manufacturing itself.

I think if you had amd use facilities of Intel and tsmc caliber (same node they're on now though so no node advantage or anything) it would be a different story. Glofo sucks. Sucks a lot.

 

[Qwertilot]

Well, in terms of options. they could have clocked them down a bit to where they're actually fairly efficient and rebranded them to 550/560 and 570.

Then use some cut vega chip as the 580. Maybe Vega won't be able to exist that cheaply or something, or the margins would be awful or....

 

[sandorski]

The 5xx line turned out how we all knew it would. It competes with 1060 and less, which is what it was intended to compete with. Unless Nvidia comes out with a refresh of those lines that is significantly improved, nothing significant has changed in this segment of the Market. Hopefully in a month we'll see what Vega brings, then we'll know if AMD has failed or not.

 

[tential]

Why aren't these same people who are mad about the 580 rebrand mad about titan xp naming? That's far more confusing and misleading...

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[railven]

No one cares about power consumption. Well, maybe someone looking to build one of those tiny case PCs, SFF?, but they aren't going to want one of these cards for that anyways.

Sure, they don't care, but my comparison was more the Nitro was using something like >60W more than the 480 and only gained 6% performance improvement. To me that isn't a good trade off. Which ties into my next post.

I doubt they have more than a skeleton marketing crew, having cut mostly from admin and marketing positions when they were bleeding money. They kept their money focused on R&D, which definitely paid off for Ryzen. We'll see if they can deliver similarly with Vega.

This time around it most certainly felt like AMD didn't even bother with the marketing. Leading up to RX 400 launch we had lots of AMD presentations, this time it felt like most where closed door or not aimed to the general public. With E3 around the corner, pretty much where I expect AMD to announce Vega - along with MSFT's Scorpio.

Obviously for those of us at the high-end, none of the Polaris lineup is appealing. However, I don't think AMD had any other hand to play. As a thought experiment, let's consider the potential options for RTG/AMD and likely outcomes:

1) Don't rebrand. Early batch RX480 reference cards continue to be used as the reference point for Polaris performance. Hot, noisy, throttling. Customer perception of the cards remains the same.
2) Rebrand, but optimize for a 10-20W power savings over the RX4xx series. People pan the performance of the cards, saying it offers nothing over the RX4xx series, and the power difference is largely ignored.
3) Rebrand, but optimize for stable boost clocks at or exceeding previous maximum out-of-the-box boost clocks of the RX4xx series. The cards offer something tangible over the RX4xx series, and the lack of a reference design forces a realignment of benchmarks.

Given the limitations of the Polaris architecture and the 14LPP process, expecting RTG/AMD to deliver high-end performance in a volume mainstream card is unrealistic. I still expect good deals on Polaris cards (whether RX4xx or RX5xx flavor) will move a lot of consumers to purchase. Simply because the cost of entry is good (especially with RX4xx series, or the new RX570 and RX560 cards) and I'd expect performance per dollar (the #1 metric in mainstream/budget cards) to go squarely in Polaris' favor, as it has for most of the past six months.

Yeah but the cards I looked at, #3 was such a huge trade-off. Again the Nitro+ is using over 50W more compared to a reference 480 for only 6% gains. I even picked out a MSI Gaming 480 which is known to be a power hog and the Nitro+ still topped in power consumption it only improving performance by 2%.

Even the OC on the Nitro+ wasn't impressive, and the gains probably wouldn't even be worth the extra power consumption.

 

[nathanddrews]

Why aren't these same people who are mad about the 580 rebrand mad about titan xp naming? That's far more confusing and misleading...

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Is it? Titan Xp is a different cut of a GPU, not really the same situation to the 580 and 570.

 

[Arachnotronic]

This is just not a compelling refresh, it's marketing of the same exact silicon under a new name to try to get the masses to buy.

Smart marketing, but I would have at least hoped for a "Kaby Lake" style process improvement, rather than just an upping of the power consumption to get more perf.

 

[tamz_msc]

The fact that they compared it to the 300 series in their official slides means that less people upgraded from those cards than AMD had hoped for. So at least now there is hope that such people will pick up the RX 480/470 as stocks are being cleared. Also, availability at launch was very poor with the RX 480/470, so this might turn out to be a battle of perception, similar to the R9 290/390 scenario.

 

[IEC]

This is just not a compelling refresh, it's marketing of the same exact silicon under a new name to try to get the masses to buy.

Smart marketing, but I would have at least hoped for a "Kaby Lake" style process improvement, rather than just an upping of the power consumption to get more perf.

For the RX580:
Voltages required to achieve RX480 clockspeeds are down, as are idle voltages.

For the RX570:
Memory speed boost from 6600 to 7000. Along with the lower voltages.

For the RX560:
Fully unlocked little Polaris. Add ~14% performance just from that.

Overall, not too different from Skylake --> Kaby Lake - taking the efficiency improvements and lower voltages from a maturing process and cranking it up to the max beyond what would be considered efficient.

 

[tamz_msc]

This is just not a compelling refresh, it's marketing of the same exact silicon under a new name to try to get the masses to buy.

Smart marketing, but I would have at least hoped for a "Kaby Lake" style process improvement, rather than just an upping of the power consumption to get more perf.

Kaby Lake did exactly what you described, too bad Intel forgot to update their TDP number.

 

[Mopetar]

Is it? Titan Xp is a different cut of a GPU, not really the same situation to the 580 and 570.

Anyone spending $1000+ on a GPU who doesn't know exactly what they're getting is an idiot. Hundreds of thousands to millions of consumers can get hoodwinked by dishonest rebranding, but I suspect about 0 people have ever made this mistake of purchasing an old Titan GPU when they really meant to buy a newer one. See this recent video for a few relevant examples.

Again, I think AMD would have done better call it a 480X or something along those lines. AT's review lists both cards as Polaris 10 (not 20) so it's just pure process improvements. Maybe AMD doesn't care if they're moving away from the current branding scheme in favor of making Vega more prominent. If Vega is a success, hopefully they get some mid-range Vega cards out sooner rather than later as Polaris doesn't seem as though it will have a great shelf-life.

 

[nathanddrews]

Ultimately there are two new products, 560 and 550. Neither of which are getting the attention necessary. :-(

 

[Crumpet]

I think the majority of you are overthinking this.

Ryzen 5 just released.

OEM companies will be releasing Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 prebuilts soon.

The average consumer is unlikely to purchase a prebuilt system with a brand new processor if it has an "old" graphics card in it, especially one with poor reviews.

But a prebuilt computer with a New processor and a "New" graphics card will seem like a good deal.