AMD Confirms RX 480 At $199 USD, Other APU & Polaris Announcements

[AdamOne]

I don't get it. Why does AMD claim "better performance + efficiency", when two RX 480 barely beat one GTX 1080?
One RX 480 is rated at 150W, one GTX 1080 is only rated at 180W. If anything, it's Nvidia that offers more performance/W (again).

On another note, if they can only show AotS numbers, Polaris in in deep *stuff*.

Still, if you want a *new* video card at or around $200, this 480 looks like it will be the only choice for a while. But for me, it needs Linux support that's at least on par with Nvidia.

Personally, I have a fixed electricity price where I live.

A Nvidia 980 is still a really good card. If you have two AMD 199-dollar graphic units, you're set for a long time.
The only case I can see where a 980 sucks is with latest game-studio software, Doom 2016.
Game-studios can claim less and less to be setting the standard req's for a home-gaming-rig. Most open-source games use graphic software that is simple, but works. A game studio doesn't have that freedom. They _must_ approach they're graphical code from _all_ angles, "how do we optimize this for mass-sales? How do we make this game look as amazing as it can?" etc.
In my opinion; superfluous. But they have reputations.

I think more of you posters and gamers would benefit to test some OS-games we have available to gain insight into what communitydevved' apps are like. Pioneer Scout Plus, Flightgear, Speed Dreams, forgot others

I don't care about proprietary games. Community-based devving' is underrated.
That's why a Nvidia 980 or the coming AMD-one are not bad gear

[juno]

i heard mining is profitable only on asics for long time

That applies on bitcoins, yes. There are altcoins and especially ethereum, which is being hyped quite strong atm.
Hashing algorithms differ and opposed to btc, ethereum mining requires memory and bandwidth, which only GPUs have atm.

I don't get it. Why does AMD claim "better performance + efficiency", when two RX 480 barely beat one GTX 1080?
One RX 480 is rated at 150W, one GTX 1080 is only rated at 180W. If anything, it's Nvidia that offers more performance/W (again).

Multiple GPUs are always more inefficient. You need to compare against single GPUs with the same performance, that would most probably be the 980/970/290/390 and upcoming 1060.
So we have to appreciate first that they made a huge step compared to the mentioned last gen cards. Nvidia has to release the 1060 with same perf. at ~80 Watts to maintain the gap. I don't see that happening, tbh but they might surprise me The 1060 might still be a bit more efficient but who cares about 20 Watts anyway.
edit: it is said that it actually consumes something quite above 100 watts. TDP/max board power is 150. We'll have to wait for tests and see.

[faph]

I don't get it. Why does AMD claim "better performance + efficiency", when two RX 480 barely beat one GTX 1080?
One RX 480 is rated at 150W, one GTX 1080 is only rated at 180W. If anything, it's Nvidia that offers more performance/W (again).

Because AMD says the RX480s only run at 51% utilization, so:
NVIDIA GTX 1080: 180W x 98,7 % Utilization = ~ 177,66 W
AMD 2x Rx480: 2 x 150W x 51 % Utilization = ~ 153 W

On one hand the 51% utilization is nice, because it means less heat (also less waste heat), more silent gpu cooler system and hence more efficiency.
OTOH actually you want to get 100% out of GPU, otherwise you payed more for what you actually get. And furthermore it's kind of risky to only rely on multi-GPU performance (not supported everywhere, more overhead in comparison to single-gpu).

[bug77]

Because AMD says the RX480s only run at 51% utilization, so:
NVIDIA GTX 1080: 180W x 98,7 % Utilization = ~ 177,66 W
AMD 2x Rx480: 2 x 150W x 51 % Utilization = ~ 153 W

On one hand the 51% utilization is nice, because it means less heat (also less waste heat), more silent gpu cooler system and hence more efficiency.
OTOH actually you want to get 100% out of GPU, otherwise you payed more for what you actually get. And furthermore it's kind of risky to only rely on multi-GPU performance (not supported everywhere, more overhead in comparison to single-gpu).

Eh, if the utilization would really be 51%, you would only need the second card to handle the odd spike here and there. But in this case, the RX 480 would be pretty close in performance to the GTX 1080. And again, if that was true, AMD would be trumpeting "performance close to 1070/1080 for $199" instead.

But yes, your explanation could explain how AMD was able to claim better efficiency.

At the end of the day, we got a lot of presentation and barely any information about the actual product. Then again, the Pascal announcement was exactly full of benchmark numbers.

[juno]

These are naive calculations. If they would reach a 1080 with two 480@50% they could as well have showcased just one, be a bit slower and still sell more 480 that they could ever produce.
That "utilisation" does say nothing and AotS does utilise AMD GPUs quite well actually by excessively using async computing. And, btw. this does not mean 51% of power usage.

[Kano]

First we need a (Vulkan) Linux game with MultiGPU support before anybody can say something about scaling. I would always prefer a single GPU because you get better speed without CF/SLI profiles. For the major benchmarks you can expect those of course and for AAA games and Windows but if you get a new game without profile the second card does nothing. Btw i got a GTX 295 a while ago, it burnt a 370 W beqiet PSU (i thought it was the 420 W one) within 2 min running Furmark (a reason why I would not buy beqiet again, it should have had an overload protection). That means if you run stess testing tools the max power is used. If one game only needs 51 % (of what actually?) says nothing. Not sure for 2 Polaris 10 cards but the GTX 295 was so loud you needed to use headphones.

[blindfrog]

The fact that they're allowing 15w APUs again is going to be disaster, because that's what every single OEM is going to ship and their performance is abysmal because of the heavy throttling. No reason to trust that it's going to be magically better than Carrizo which was supposed to be usable already.

[Soul_keeper]

This is the first time i've been excited about hardware in like 5yrs.
Can't wait

[theriddick]

there are no plans for adding multigpu to mesa opengl. if you need multigpu your choices are vulkan or amdgpu-pro opengl

I can live with that. I'm not as stuck up as other people who INSIST on open everything or have cry

Also isn't AMDGPU-PRO going open source eventually? won't that sort of bring MultiGPU support to mesa anyway? in time.

Either way I'm eager to see Freesync and MultiGPU (for OpenGL PLEASE) on Linux in any form, I don't care.

[JonathanM]

Also isn't AMDGPU-PRO going open source eventually? won't that sort of bring MultiGPU support to mesa anyway? in time.

Not the OpenGL part, but the Vulkan part will be open sourced eventually.