The Most Power Efficient & Best Value Of AMD GPUs For Linux Gamers

[drSeehas]

A R7 370 faster than a R9 285?
Something is wrong!

[Ploplop]

AFAIK (and if I understood everything correctly), the estimation of the power consumption as done today is flawed...

If a device consume 100W during 2 seconds and another 50W during 20 seconds, current test will say that the second card is the most efficient. However it isn't because the second one takes much more time to perform the same work.

That's plain obvious for CPUs: the average power is not the good value.

For GPUs, it could be much more complicated: the benchmarks need to be

1) either at constant fps (to compare the power consumption displaying the same thing, not at 30 fps for card X and one at 180 fps for card Y with card Y being obviously much more power hungry);
2) or at constant frame number: this way, you measure the time it takes to get the job done (i.e. displaying X frames in total on either GPU).

But in both case (even in the first one), it is far better to intergrate the power consuption over time instead of calculating an average.

To the bystander: if you really want to consume less power, either try to play your game on a raspberry pi OR choose any card you want but limit the FPS number. You can't possibly compare the power consumption of one GPU and the other that does twice as much work and saying "OMG, I won't by that second card that consumes twice as much power".

[Jonathan Silverblood]

What I miss here is some APUs. When looking at power efficiency, they should at least be contenders. When looking at price, they should at least be contenders.

FPS though, probably not so much

[Luke_Wolf]

Have you seen the benchmark results?

Even considering the benchmarks if you care exclusively about performance and want AMD, yeah you're going to go with a fury. Things may not look wonderful now, but Catalyst needs quite a bit more work to work appropriately with that HBM memory (both on Windows and Linux) after which it should really shine, and the card won't really show its legs until Vulkan hits. However assuming you see a card as a 4-5 year investment it'll provide the best performance of current AMD cards in the long run. Now if you're the kind of person who replaces their card every year, then of course the results as they stand today are what you're going to care about and you should probably go with the 290 or 390.

[Klassic Six]

No it isn't - if you care strictly about performance, go for the Fury. If you care about performance but you're on a budget, go for the 290. The Fury might not be too impressive at the moment, but most distros don't even have drivers that support it yet, so give it some time and it'll always outperform the others. Generally speaking, if you have a 1080p screen, the 290 is good enough for almost anything.

Have you seen the benchmark results?

[schmidtbag]

You're right but still if someone just care about performance it's hard to decide.

No it isn't - if you care strictly about performance, go for the Fury. If you care about performance but you're on a budget, go for the 290. The Fury might not be too impressive at the moment, but most distros don't even have drivers that support it yet, so give it some time and it'll always outperform the others. Generally speaking, if you have a 1080p screen, the 290 is good enough for almost anything.

[dungeon]

You're right but still if someone just care about performance it's hard to decide.

Who care only about performance fastest is Fury X obviously, but that one is not tested here. And if you look what benchmarks said on power/watt average that R7 370 eldest gen is the best... then

Regardless what some benchmarks said people interested in performance should buy whatever AMD official price range said, as those are scaled fine by performance. Obviously not all benchmark situations show the difference, but some will.

[Klassic Six]

That's for you to decide. Some people care about power consumption, others care about achieving the highest FPS, while others remain on a budget.

You're right but still if someone just care about performance it's hard to decide.

[dungeon]

Somebody here told me a R7 360. Of course I was asking for a replacement for a 6670. Finding a replacement in the same price range but with better performance can get quite difficult.

That was probably I Because in around or bellow $100 range, that Bonaire or earlier one works the best with opensource driver. With the best i mean, it is more stable and there was much less bugs if compared with the others (Tahiti i am looking mainly at you )

With Catalyst situation is more stable across asics and more scalable, but that claim depends on running apps which are scalable in perfromance and do it properly (if i can say that for eONs ). As both Dirt and Bioshock tested here tell the different story if you enable game engine switch --eon_disable_catalyst_workarounds

Without that switch Bioshock missrender and Dirt does not have all options available/enabled... and also runs slower.

[schmidtbag]

Can't say which gpu is the best??

That's for you to decide. Some people care about power consumption, others care about achieving the highest FPS, while others remain on a budget.