AMD Launches Antigua (Tonga) Powered Radeon R9 380X

[dungeon]

I don't buy anything. I don't own an APU, but i got used AMD hardware recently with RS780, and guess what: it showed HEVC support with vdpauinfo - you get the same error with any AMD gfx card with DX10 i guess - my HD 4550 had the same issue.

That was a bug, which is fixed AFAIK... who cares much what some info said sometimes - false positive. Current glxinfo not really up to date in Debian shows inproper GL version with Catalyst, and it is not bug in Catalyst but in glxinfo which is fixed in git version Do i care about that, nope i ignore it, even if every Phoronix article with Catalyst shows it wrongly i don't care again i know it is bacause glxinfo shipped with Ubuntu has that bug too

[Kano]

Well i would still go with Nvidia GTX 960 (or GTX 970 in case if of no interest in HEVC) for Linux gaming, buying AMD hardware for Linux gaming is lost money - no matter how the card is called. Did you see any impressive AMDGPU Tonga mesa results? If you use fglrx there is no huge difference to Nvidia - binary OpenGL is what you get on the other side as well. If you want a Linux gaming card, why would you buy this one? The R400 series should get a new UVD 6 part, maybe that is at least a bit interesting for Linux, can't say that for Tonga rebrands - if you enable a few cores more or not - this does not change the chip much.

[dungeon]

I don't buy anything. I don't own an APU...

I know you will never buy any hardware from AMD, that is not news from you This is nor first, not last time i heard this, not news again...

You forgot to complain about no HDMI 2.0 support

[SystemCrasher]

GPU: Radeon_7790 @2TFlops GCN1.1 =130$

I guess you can find something like R9 270X for comparable price, if not below this tag. More powerful thing overall.

CPU: Unlocked 8+_issue Pentium 4+Ghz =60$

Sure, running slow, crappy and power hungry P-IV is "not stupid". Except it slow, hot, noisy, and there is virtually no power management, so it wastes plenty of power even if not doing anythnig meaningful. Which is kinda noticeable in bills.

BOARD: Non_Z Overclocking =50$

Sure, let's make this crap even more hot and who cares of reliability and data corruption, etc...

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, sorry that i am not stupid.

I wonder if you pay electricity bills yourself? And if yes, have you considered how much electricity P-IV crap wastes?

[Yorgos]

Michael, I would personally rather not see you waste a bunch of time/money on rebadged cards. Of course, if people are interested enough in a rebadged product to fund a full review, go for it.

rebadged?
I guess you call titan, 960m, 970m, 980m, 980(laptop version), 980 rebadges.

gm200 has 5 rebadges and gm204 has at least 1(I don't know if they rebadged a tesla or grid gpu yet)

You must be the '1 asic - 1 GPU' guy. What's your last purchase Voodoo 3... but what am I saying, Voodoo 3 had 1 rebadge, the original AGP and the PCI which was rebadged.

[SystemCrasher]

That was a bug, which is fixed AFAIK... who cares much what some info said sometimes - false positive.

Well it could be tempting to believe AMD engineers are so great they can foresee video codecs development for next 10 years, integrating couple of next-gen codecs without ever seeing their draft specs. And while AMD engineers can sometimes kick the ass, this still waaaaay too good to be true. From purely logical standpoint, once codec specs are finalized, it is time to begin designing IP block. It makes little sense to do IP block before this moment, because each IC revision attempt costs quite a lot of money, so doing another IC revision just to correct some dumb mismatch in codec specs could be wasteful idea. So it seems it usually takes some time between release of specs and arrival of actual implementations in hardware. And believing HD4xxx can decode H.265 in hardware is, uhm, funny.

At very most I can imagine someone can manage to program codec to decode on GPU. Say, there're some patches trying to make OpenCL-based VP9 decoder. Yet, there're some troubles on the way, and pre-HD5000 GPUs do not even have OpenCL with open drivers, nobody is working on it, and even in proprietery driver pre-HD5000 hardware exposes kinda crappy performance. No magic can turn vintage HD4000 into powerhouse...

[artivision]

I guess you can find something like R9 270X for comparable price, if not below this tag. More powerful thing overall.


Sure, running slow, crappy and power hungry P-IV is "not stupid". Except it slow, hot, noisy, and there is virtually no power management, so it wastes plenty of power even if not doing anythnig meaningful. Which is kinda noticeable in bills.


Sure, let's make this crap even more hot and who cares of reliability and data corruption, etc...


I wonder if you pay electricity bills yourself? And if yes, have you considered how much electricity P-IV crap wastes?

First, a Skylake Pentium without AVX is faster than a Sandybridge. More issue (8-10 vs 6), more vectorization (512bit vs 256bit) and extra Skylake instructions minus AVX instructions.
Second, 80w for the Gpu and 60w for the Cpu is not a big deal. Any way i own 10kw roof based Photovoltaics, so they pay me, i don't pay them.

[dungeon]

@SystemCrasher

Well there is a reason, why closed drivers fglrx/nvidia do legacy driver separations.... to not broke things for older chips, while developing for new.

One of the reason of separation with amdgpu and radeon, is again same reason - to no broke older Imagine AMD did overhaul of radeon driver (instead of developing amdgpu) to support new approach, driver would be likely be completely broken for next 5 years and even then things would not be reverted to previous state for older chips

People with older chips should be really happy because driver is not touched there.

[gigaplex]

I don't have a problem with renaming. Besides it has different specs. It's not exactly the same. We are in an era now where GPU capability is handled in software and GPU's themselves only need to scale performance. In this kind of situation renaming is perfectly valid.

We are in no such era. A significant portion of the "new" 300 series lineup can't do Freesync at a hardware level.

[DanL]

rebadged?
I guess you call titan, 960m, 970m, 980m, 980(laptop version), 980 rebadges.

No, as others have pointed out, this is not just a rebadge. Michael's wording confused me.