R9 380x rumor and speculation thread

[LTC8K6]

They didn't want to do it because they didn't have price room for it given how quickly the 290's price fell after the 970 launch. BTW, since the 290 is still available at the price they are talking about the 380X the 290 would have to go to make sense.

Well, they really should have retired the oldest chips and put out 3 or 4 Tonga variants when the 285 was released, imo.

Maybe even 5 variants if Tonga can actually support a 384bit memory bus.

A line of new cards based on the new Tonga chip would have done well, imo.

I think they missed an opportunity with the public in order to satisfy Apple.

For one thing, I would now be a happy AMD card owner for a year, ready to upgrade to my next AMD card.

Instead, I had to wait, and I'm still waiting. Possibly foolishly.

 

[3DVagabond]

Comparing sale prices with RRP doesn't make any sense.

 

[.vodka]

Finally.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9801/amd-launches-radeon-r9-380x

As far as performance goes then, the R9 380X is about 10% faster than the 2GB R9 380 at 1080p, with the card taking a much more significant advantage in games where 2GB cards are memory bottlenecked. Otherwise the performance is almost exactly on-par with the 7970 and its variants, while the more powerful R9 390 has a sizable 43% performance advantage thanks to its greater CU count, memory bandwidth, and ROPs. This makes the R9 390 a bit of a spoiler on value, though its $290+ price tag ultimately puts it in its own class. Or to throw in a quick generational comparison to AMD's original $250 GCN card, Radeon HD 7850, you're looking at a 75% increase in performance at this price bracket over 3 years.

As for the competition, as I previously mentioned AMD will be slotting in between the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960. The former is going to be quite a bit faster but also quite a bit more expensive, while the R9 380X will handily best the 2GB GTX 960, albeit with a price premium of its own. At this point it’s safe to say that AMD holds a distinct edge on performance for the price, as they often do, though as has been the case all this generation they aren’t going to match NVIDIA’s power efficiency.

And it's a hard launch. $229.

As predicted, cheaper to manufacture R9 280X performance at lower power and more features. Once it's down to $200 it should be a no brainer buy for 1080p over the 960. (I believe it already is)

TPU's sample overclocked to 1135/1638 from 1030/1425.

 

[Kalessian]

Looks like a great deal at ~$200

 

[gamervivek]

Performance looks kinda disappointing with 380X being slightly slower than 280X, though it's also clocked 30Mhz lower on core, 75Mhz less on memory.

Power usage in comparison is about 50W less for the Asus Strix version than 280X.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_Strix/

 

[master_shake_]

this is amd's answer to the 960?

turd for a turd?



it's cheap so good.

they should give it a slogan "last years performance today"

 

[littleg]

Looks pretty good to me. Price is reasonable enough, especially considering it'll be cheaper in sales / rebates etc. Beats the 960 hands down and runs silent at idle and quiet under load.

Think this will become the go to card in the mid range price points.

 

[Techhog]

...

Well, I guess I'm eating crow. How did they even manage to make it slower than the 280X? That's amazing...

Someone needs to give AMD money to build a completely new architecture from scratch. Both this card and Fury X show that GCN 1.2 is a regression in per-core performance, and it'll only get worse from here...

I'll wait for more reviews, though. Only one review can indicate bias.

 

[piesquared]

Nice job AMD. The 380X is the fastest card under $250, and has all the bells and whistles lacking from Kepler and even Maxwell. I dub this card the mainstream champion.

 

[96Firebird]

The 280X is the fastest card under $250... Unless you also include sale prices of 390/970.

 

[Rickyyy369]

...

Well, I guess I'm eating crow. How did they even manage to make it slower than the 280X? That's amazing...

Someone needs to give AMD money to build a completely new architecture from scratch. Both this card and Fury X show that GCN 1.2 is a regression in per-core performance, and it'll only get worse from here...

I'll wait for more reviews, though. Only one review can indicate bias.

Same number of shaders. Lower clock speed. Smaller memory interface.

 

[Techhog]

Same number of shaders. Lower clock speed. Smaller memory interface.

The memory interface shouldn't have been an issue due to the improved compression. It also should have been faster per clock. Why does the 380 beat the 280, while the 380X loses to the 280X? Why does this card even exist? This is easily the worst card released since... I don't even know. in the last 10 years at least easily.

 

[SimianR]

It really depends on the game, it seems to trade blows with the 280X. Some sites are showing it as faster overall. I honestly think at $229 it is a great card, if you don't want to spend almost $300 on a 290/390/970. The performance combined with 4GB of VRAM make it a great choice imo.

 

[Rickyyy369]

The memory interface shouldn't have been an issue due to the improved compression. It also should have been faster per clock. Why does the 380 beat the 280, while the 380X loses to the 280X? Why does this card even exist? This is easily the worst card released since... I don't even know. in the last 10 years at least easily.

Did you not have your coffee this morning? You seem a little irritable. This card is not the worst card released in the past decade. I think Fermi and the R600 might argue over that crown. This is just a midrange card released to compete with the GTX 960, and it does so quite admirably.

 

[piesquared]

The 280X is the fastest card under $250... Unless you also include sale prices of 390/970.

If you can get a 390 under $250 then that's the card to get. As far as MSRP, which is how cards are classed, then the 380X is the fastest card under $250. And that's for an after market card, reference are even less.

 

[gamervivek]

It does smack around the 960 in TPU review, being 28% faster at 1080p and overclocks well too since the vanilla clocks are slower than 280X's. TPU get 1136Mhz on the strix card, which is 17% better than the stock 970Mhz, 1150Mhz in a couple of other reviews I saw. Volt modding will get it up to 1.2-1.25Ghz.

It does get close to 290 in some games in Guru3d review, even matching the 970 in thief but also falls behind in 280X in some.

The less power usage seems to be Asus doing better with it once again like with their Fury version.

 

[Techhog]

Did you not have your coffee this morning? You seem a little irritable. This card is not the worst card released in the past decade. I think Fermi and the R600 might argue over that crown. This is just a midrange card released to compete with the GTX 960, and it does so quite admirably.

So did the 380. Unless they lower the price of this to $200 to compete directly with the 960 and lower the 4GB 380 to $150 to take on the 950, this is a worthless card. Even then, it's still worse than the 280X and isn't really justifiable over the cheaper 380, so it's a waste of R&D.

 

[richaron]

Pretty unimpressed, tho I guess it does slide into the product stack somewhere...

A faster card with 384 bit memory could have been released over a year ago. This card could have been released over a year ago. But AMD refused to sell us even a 4gb cut down version (285/380) for almost a year. Let alone this months later.

I guess if you need a card now you have to decide, but I'm not one to reward a company for withholding products.

In less time than it took Tonga to go from 2GB to 4GB we'll have gpus on a new node. Guess I'll keep waiting.

 

[tviceman]

A 365mm2 (Tonga) chip beating a 225mm2 (GM206) by only 15-20% and the 225mm2 has way more OC headroom to cut the gap to a negligible difference.... ouch. Also considering that 4gb 960's are starting at $170 after MIR, $230 for 380x isn't going to shift any opinions and sway anyone who was on the fence. Might as well spend an extra $50 to get 390/970 performance (and a free game with the 970).

 

[burninatortech4]

I was really hoping this card would have a solid 5-7% lead on the 280x. I'd rather spend 50 more for an after rebate 390 for an additional 30% performance.

 

[crisium]

Well that's a better price than $250. Still, it has the same threat of the much faster 290-970-390 tier above. If your budget is $230 exactly for a GPU I'd really suggest finding ways to stretch it to one of those far superior cards.

 

[RussianSensation]

The memory interface shouldn't have been an issue due to the improved compression. It also should have been faster per clock. Why does the 380 beat the 280, while the 380X loses to the 280X? Why does this card even exist? This is easily the worst card released since... I don't even know. in the last 10 years at least easily.

Let me help you with that assessment.

GTX760 launched June 15, 2013
GTX960 2GB launched as a replacement Jan 22, 2015 (+577 days)
Performance increase of 14-16%, which has now turned to a measly 12%.

vs.

GTX960 2GB launched January 22, 2015
R9 380X 4GB launched November 19, 2015 (+301 days)
Performance increase of 28% from the same review.

That means R9 380X offers double the VRAM of the standard 960 version and offers 2-2.5X the performance increase relative to the 960 that 960 offered relative to the 760 -- and all of this happened in a far shorter time-span. Between R9 380X and GTX960, which card failed miserably in price/performance given the time-frame that it took to come out, had a ticking time-bomb VRAM bottleneck on day 1?

380X isn't going to set the world on fire at $229 but 960 was a far worse videocard release in 2015. Too bad so much of the North American media is in NV's pocket.

Let's not even get started on the $150 GTX950 2GB.

----

Glad to see someone at AMD came to their senses and priced this card at $229. With $20 MIRs, in an objective PC world, this card should kill GTX960.

A 365mm2 (Tonga) chip beating a 225mm2 (GM206) by only 15-20% and the 225mm2 has way more OC headroom to cut the gap to a negligible difference.... ouch. Also considering that 4gb 960's are starting at $170 after MIR, $230 for 380x isn't going to shift any opinions and sway anyone who was on the fence. Might as well spend an extra $50 to get 390/970 performance (and a free game with the 970).

Without question R9 390/970 are worth the extra $50 right now, albeit I hardly saw the same argument made on these forums for the R9 290 vs. 960. Hmmm. Anyway, not sure why die sizes have anything to do with what the consumer pays though. Certainly perf/mm2 metric didn't help HD4000/5000/6000 series in the eyes of most consumers. In many games the 960 is getting rekt by a stock 280X so your overclocking argument doesn't work at all since R9 380X can also overclock 10-15%, not to mention 960's early DX12 benchmarks are less than stellar to put it mildly. Once the 380X cards drop to $199, it's going to put huge downward pressure on 950/960 prices. We are still many months away from 16nm GPUs which means 380X will be around for at least 6-8 months and right now NV has no answer to this card unless they introduce a 960Ti, which wouldn't be a shocker

As a side-note, certain sites that were pushing GTX960 2GB by giving it Silver/Gold Awards blatantly ignored 2GB VRAM bottlenecks on certain cards. #EXPOSED

 

[Elixer]

The 280X is the fastest card under $250... Unless you also include sale prices of 390/970.

No... the 290 is the fastest card under $250.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202043
$219.99 after $20.00 rebate card.

Hard to beat a 290 at that price point.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Let's not even get started on the $150 GTX950 2GB.

That card has a purpose at least. If you need HEVC decoding, HDMI 2.0, or HDCP 2.2 that is your cheapest option.

The 380X would be WAY more impressive if it had a full HEVC decoder, or HDMI 2.0.

 

[RussianSensation]

No... the 290 is the fastest card under $250.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202043
$219.99 after $20.00 rebate card.

Hard to beat a 290 at that price point.

Even cheaper. Check this out:

Newegg has a 2-day Flash Sale on R9 290 for $180. Add a $1-2 filler, get $25 off $200 with AMEX and this card is ~$157. Even after buying an after-market AIO to cool it, still way better deal than any card in the $150-240 space right now.

That card has a purpose at least. If you need HEVC decoding, HDMI 2.0, or HDCP 2.2 that is your cheapest option.

The 380X would be WAY more impressive if it had a full HEVC decoder, or HDMI 2.0.

Ya, but with AMD's limited budget, I guess they couldn't afford to incorporate those parts into existing 28nm parts. We'll have to wait until 16nm GPUs for HDMI 2.0, DP1.3 (?), etc.