The Video Card Thread

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The Video Card Thread

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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I'd like to contribute to this thread:
Don't even try crossfire in windows 10! :lol:

I'll have an update for this when I get my new monitor.
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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Nvidia GTX 1000 series tipped to show up at Computex

There has been a lot of talk surrounding Pascal recently, Nvidia even announced the specifications for its ‘Big Pascal’ GP100 GPU and while we have yet to see Nvidia’s upcoming GTX 1000-series cards, that could change soon as we may end up seeing the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 appear at Computex this year.

Computex kicks off at the end of May this year and it usually brings along a whole slew of announcements. According to Taiwanese sources speaking with DigiTimes, Nvidia is ready to reveal its new GeForce 1000 series at the event, with several key add-in board partners all prepared to show off the new cards.

The GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 will be based on Nvidia’s GP104 chip and recently, we got a look at what could be the new cooling shroud for the reference cooler of both cards. These new graphics cards are expected to deliver comparable performance to our current GM200 Maxwell cards, like the GTX 980Ti based on current rumours and speculation.

We have also heard that AMD may be revealing the R9 490 and R9 490x GPUs around Computex, featuring the new Polaris 10 architecture so we may have quite a few graphics card launches between the end of May and the end of June.

KitGuru Says: These are certainly exciting times in the graphics card space with Nvidia and AMD set to debut brand new architectures in such a short amount of time. Are any of you waiting on AMD and Nvidia to reveal their new cards in the next few months? Will you be planning an upgrade?

Source: KitGuru

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Update: it's not as useless as it was.. but Crossfire in windows 10 is still pretty bad!
When I got these cards I was running 10 and it was still catalyst.. For the first month, all was well! then Crimson came out and it was still OK, first crimson update KILLED crossfire.. 6 months later, it's back to being usable..

I'm still saving for my SSD to REALLY try out my system.. but some things work great, some are still glitchy and buggy as fuck..
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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Nvidia unveils GTX 1080 and GTX 1070: a new level in GPU power

"Irresponsible levels of performance."

Nvidia has officially revealed the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, based on its new Pascal architecture, offering an astonishing leap in performance and power efficiency over its existing 900-series Maxwell cards. According to Nvidia, the GTX 1080 is faster than two GTX 980s in SLI, shipping to users on May 27th at $599. Meanwhile, the GTX 1070 offers Titan X level performance for just over one third of the price - $379 - and is set to launch on June 10th.

Both products are based on Nvidia's GP104 processor, featuring a 7.2 billion transistor count. The GTX 1080 features 2560 CUDA cores, offering 9 TFLOPs of performance, and is paired with 8GB of Micron's state-of-the-art GDDR5X (or G5X, as Nvidia called it). Meanwhile, no core count has been announced for the GTX 1070, but we do know that it ships with 8GB of standard GDDR5 and has a 6.5 TFLOP performance level.

Clock-speeds and overclocking headroom look remarkable. Boost clock on GTX 1080 is rated at higher than 1700MHz, but a real-time Unreal Engine 4 demo shown on stage saw the card overclocked on air, rock-solid at 2114MHz. On-screen stats using the EVGA Precision X monitoring software saw temperature at just 67 degrees Celsius, with the G5X memory operating at 5508MHz - 10gbps effective.

In terms of direct comparisons with the firm's previous performance leader, Nvidia revealed a power efficiency/performance graph which seems to suggest something along the lines of a 20 per cent performance increase for GTX 1080 running at 180W, compared to Titan X operating at 250W.

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Of course, Add-in-board manufacturers will be supplying their own products around the suggested retail prices, but Nvidia will be selling its own 'Founder's Edition' variants through select partners, bumping up prices to $699 for the GTX 1080 and $449 for the GTX 1070. Nvidia boss Jen-Hsung Huang promises "crazy overclockability" for these parts perhaps suggesting some kind of custom power delivery mechanism. We'll look into this and report back, but all Pascal cards will be overclockable - this isn't just limited to the more expensive variants.

In our recent 'In Theory' piece, we pieced together a potential scenario for the performance level of the new wave of Pascal GPUs, based on available information derived from the official spec for the much larger GP100 chip, combined with the more plausible leaks from the Far Eastern press. We suggested that Pascal could offer Titan X-level performance for GTX 970 money - based on an established precedent that saw the 970 beat its big-chip predecessor (GTX 780 Ti) once an overclock was in place. Some might say that Nvidia has exceeded our expectations here, assuming that Titan X level performance is indeed delivered at stock clocks. However, GTX 1070 gets a $40 price-bump compared to its $330 predecessor. Regardless, the price-to-performance ratio is simply remarkable.

Bearing in mind we were already quite optimistic about Pascal's chances based on the GP100 specs, the bottom line here is that on the day, Nvidia exceeded expectations last night by some distance. Jen-Hsun Huang stated several times that Pascal took over two years to complete with the input of "thousands" of engineers and a multi-billion dollar investment. The inference here is that the firm intends to maintain its massive market dominance by outspending AMD in terms of research and development.

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Nvidia also revealed Ancel - an in-game 3D camera system, allowing you to pause gameplay, adjust special effects, brightness, field of view and then create your own 2D, 3D and surround screenshots using anything up to 1000x resolution. The Division, The Witness, Lawbreakers, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Paragon, No Man's Sky and Unreal Tournament are all set to receive Ancel support. Although it seems to operate at the driver level, clearly developer support is essential here in getting Ancel properly integrated.

There was no mention of DirectX 12 at the event - something of a sticking point for Nvidia cards thus far - but accompanying press materials describe "new asynchronous compute advances" that "improve efficiency and gaming performance", so it'll be interesting to see how Pascal performs there in an area where the existing Maxwell cards have had some issues.

Overall, it's difficult not to be impressed with the show Nvidia put on here. We knew that GTX 1080 would be the new flagship, but to post a circa 20 per cent improvement to Titan X performance is immense, factoring in the 28 per cent reduction in TDP. For its part, assuming that the Titan X comparison holds true, the GTX 1070 offers a potential 40-55 per cent improvement in performance over the GTX 970, costing just $40 more. It could be as radical a proposition as GTX 970 was back at launch - a product we described at the time as "the GPU that nukes almost the entire high-end graphics market from orbit."

Going into the event, Nvidia staff gave us the impression that Pascal would offer the same level of ambition and performance that defined the GPU classics of the past - graphics cards like the GTX 970 and the 8800GT. Of course, the jury's out until both products are in the Digital Foundry lair with the benchmarks complete, but in the meantime, hopes are sky-high based on this remarkable showing.

Source: Eurogamer

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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In Theory: Can AMD Polaris regain the mainstream PC graphics market?

New leaks offer a clearer picture of prospective R9 470/R9 480 performance in the sub-£200 category.

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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AMD Teases Radeon RX 480: Launching June 29th For $199

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Kicking off at this moment is AMD’s Computex 2016 keynote. The company has multiple announcements scheduled this evening, but we’re going to jump right into an area that has been of extreme interest for many of our readers: GPUs.

Ahead of this evening’s event, AMD sent out an email to the press teasing the first of their discrete Polaris architecture based cards. Called the Radeon RX 480, AMD has unveiled much of the product’s specifications, but also its price and availability. When the card hits the streets on June 29th, it will be starting at the crucial mainstream battleground price point of $199.

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First off, the RX 480 will include 36 CUs. If we assume 64 stream processors to a CU – the GCN standard – then this brings us to 2304 SPs. AMD has not named the specific Polaris GPU being used here, but given the CU count I believe it’s reasonable to assume that this is a Polaris 10 SKU, as I’ve already seen Polaris 11 and it’s a very small chip better suited for notebooks.

AMD also revealed that the card would offer over 5 TFLOPs of compute performance. Given what we know about the CU count, this allows us to estimate the GPU clockspeed. This puts the lower bound of the GPU clockspeed at 1.08GHz and an upper bound (6 TFLOPs) at 1.3GHz, which would be in the range of 10-30% higher clocked than comparable Radeon 300 series cards.

In terms of raw numbers this puts the RX 480 just shy of the current Radeon R9 390. However it also doesn’t take into account the fact that one of the major focuses for Polaris will be in improving architectural efficiency. I would certainly expect that even at the lower end of clockspeed estimates, RX 480 could pull ahead of the R9 390, in which case we’re looking at a part that would deliver performance between the R9 390 and R9 390X, with final clockspeeds and architectural efficiency settling just how close to R9 390X the new card gets.

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On the memory front the card is equipped with 8Gbps GDDR5, running along a 256-bit memory bus. This is the typical bus width for AMD x80-series cards, and the high clocked 8Gbps GDDR5 means that we’re looking at a total of 256GB/sec of memory bandwidth to feed the RX 480’s GPU. AMD’s partners will be offering both 4GB and 8GB cards, and for the purposes of this teaser I assume that pricing information will be for the 4GB card, with 8GB serving as a premium option.

Finally, AMD has also revealed the TDP for the RX 480, stating that it will be a 150W card. As Polaris is built on 14nm FinFET, we’re seeing first-hand the benefits of finally making the long-awaited jump off of 28nm, as this means we’re looking at Radeon R9 390 series performance in a card that, on paper, consumes only a bit more than half the power. This also puts the RX 480 right in the sweet spot for mainstream cards, as 150W has traditionally struck a good balance between performance and power consumption that allows for a fast card that doesn’t require aggressive cooling, and is more compatible with OEM computer vendor case & cooling designs.

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Cementing its place as a mainstream card, the RX 480 pricing will start at $199. This is an aggressive and heavily fought over price point that has traditionally defined the mainstream segment, attracting buyers who want great 1080p gaming performance that sub-$150 value cards can’t offer, without moving up to more expensive (and power hungry) $300+ cards. In this sense the RX 480 is a direct replacement for the R9 380, AMD’s Tonga-based card that hit the market roughly a year ago at the same price. Going by the raw numbers alone, RX 480 would be 40% (or more) faster than the R9 380.

Meanwhile I won’t speculate too much on the competitive market from a teaser, but it’s worth noting that this is nearly half the price of NVIDIA’s currently cheapest Pascal card, the GeForce GTX 1070. Interestingly both cards have the same 150W TDP, but looking at the throughput figures it does not look like RX 480 is meant to offer quite as high performance as NVIDIA’s card.

Moving on, along with teasing the RX 480’s specifications, AMD’s teaser also laid out their marketing plans for the card. We’re previously talked about how both Oculus and Valve/HTC were encouraging developers to treat VR like a fixed platform, and setting minimum hardware specifications to go along with that. On the AMD side those specifications called for a Radeon R9 290, which the RX 480 should be able to beat.

As a result AMD is planning on heavily promoting the VR aspects of the RX 480, as it brings the necessary performance down from a 250W, $300+ card to a 150W, $200 card. In fact AMD is claiming that VR performance will be closer to $500 video cards, in which case we’d be looking at performance closer to the Radeon R9 Nano, a Fiji based card.

With all of that said, the video card is just one component in the total price of a VR system – you still need the headset – but on the PC side it has also been the most expensive component. Consequently, AMD sees cheaper video cards that offer good VR performance as being important to bringing down the total price of a VR-ready system, and will be promoting the RX 480 as the prescription for entry-level VR needs. From a business perspective, AMD is ultimately expecting VR to be a fast-growing market, so the company wants to make sure they don’t miss out and have more VR-capable cards on the market as quickly as they can.

Along those lines, AMD’s release also makes note that at least one model will be “both HTC Vive Ready and Oculus Rift certified,” though no further details are being offered at this time. Whether this is just a certification matter or if there’s going to be something special about this model (e.g. connectors) is open to speculation.

Finally, now that they’ve revealed the price and much of the specifications of their first Polaris card, AMD is also releasing more details on their overall development and market positioning strategy with Polaris. As AMD has hinted at in the past, Polaris is being specifically developed for and aimed at the mainstream market. AMD wants to recapture lost market share – especially in laptops – and the large mainstream market is seen as the best way to do that. AMD is calling this their “water drop” strategy, and I expect we’ll hear a bit more about it tonight, including the meaning behind the name.

And with all of that said, it looks like we’re going to have a lot of AMD to talk about on June 29th. So until they, stay tuned.

Source: Anandtech

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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With windows 10 still not liking playing nice with crossfire I'm almost about to jump ship... ALMOST!
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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Before I try any of AMD's new cards, I'll wait for the non reference coolers..

WHY DO COMPANIES STILL USE BARREL COOLERS? I cannot for the life of me work it out.. :puke: :?:

There is no benefit to using them.. like AT ALL, is it just so they can sell cards with proper coolers later on for a little bit more? :olol:
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Re: The Video Card Thread

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The Cheapest Radeon RX 480 In Australia Is Now $319

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The global embargo for AMD’s Radeon RX 480 graphics card isn’t meant to lift until 11PM tonight, but that hasn’t stopped some major Australian retailers from jumping the gun.

We reported earlier this morning how one retailer inadvertently advertised a price of $420 for an MSI-branded card. Those figures look set to drop, however, with one of Australia’s largest retailers advertising the 4GB model of the RX 480 for $319, and 8GB models starting from $379.

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PC Case Gear are advertising XFX-branded RX 480’s for less than $400, with the overclocked version at $399 being around $40 cheaper than the standard models from other retailers. The 4GB model is currently listed as “Sold Out”, but stock is available for all of the 8GB models.

The move is likely to result in some emergency price drops among other retailers. Multiple sources confirmed to me over the past week that they were likely to sell their boards for around $440.

The XFX Radeon RX 480 Black OC has a core clock speed of 1328 MHz, slightly higher than the 1266 MHz reference RX 480’s ship with according to leaked screenshots that have appeared over the last week. The only other special features include an XFX backplate.

It’s the kind of highly aggressive pricing that fans were hoping for since the RX 480 was announced. The prospect of being able to buy a VR capable card at $380 also makes it a lot easier to swallow for people looking at discounted stock of the GTX 980 and the R9 390X, the two cards which the RX 480 is expected to immediately rival.

Source: Kotaku

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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The pricing is great, but I don't know if I could go amd. I cannot stand their drivers and software. I love using shadow play on my 770 as well.

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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Under $300 and I'd be jumping on the RX480 for anything but my main machine.

I don't have one yet.. Give me a few weeks and I might buy a couple just to see what they can do.. But it looks like the golden child that WAS the 970 (price/performance/power usage/heat) has been dethroned, and by quite a bit in all aspects by this new card.

It's $100 cheaper than a 970 (here at least).. and I doubt ANYONE buying a card at this level would be able to tell any performance difference.

It seems as though AMD have got this right (even with the 'fuck you Australia tax' pricing).. I can't wait to see what they can do with the rest of the year in both GPUs and CPUs
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Re: The Video Card Thread

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After reading up on this amd range a bit more, I'll be going nvidia once again.

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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The 480 is £219.99 @ Amazon UK
I can't get no...

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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That's the 8GB version.

It's £173.99 for the 4GB here:

http://www.ebuyer.com/751840-xfx-amd-ra ... -480m4bfa6

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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It's all about that RAM ceiling.
I can't get no...

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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AMD admits RX 480 power tuning is “not optimal”

Following reports that the RX 480 exceeds 150W TDP, AMD begins work on software fix.

The tests, conducted by Tom's Hardware, caused quite the stir over on Reddit. Some Reddit users even conducted their own tests on retail versions of the RX 480, with some (though not all) throwing up similar results. AMD has now issued a statement, admitting that the tuning on certain RX 480 cards is "not optimal."

As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximise their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday.

While AMD's statement doesn't indicate precisely what's causing the issues with the RX 480, if it is exceeding its 150W target, either something is causing the card to run in the wrong power state, or it's exceeding its power limit and needs to be throttled back. There's some speculation that AMD was simply too ambitious with the RX 480's power draw, and that the addition of an 8-pin power connector would solve the issue, as well as open up far more headroom for overclocking.

With only reference designs on sale that use a single 6-pin power connector, unfortunately it'll be a little while until that theory can be put to the test.

Source: arstechnica

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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You Can't Use The New GeForce Experience Without Logging In

About a year ago, NVIDIA quietly put everyone on notice. If you wanted the latest drivers and the latest updates to their GeForce Experience middleware program, you’d have to register an account. Simply forking out for a NVIDIA GPU wasn’t enough; you had to hand over some of your details.

GeForce Experience has quietly motored on since then, but could be about to change. NVIDIA has rolled out an update to the beta branch of the software that completely overhauls the user interface and the way the ShadowPlay/Share software is packaged. And if you want any of it, you’ll have to login.

Credit where credit’s due: the new GeForce Experience menu looks really nice. Instead of the tabs at the top for Games, Drivers, My Rig, Preferences and the NVIDIA SHIELD, everything’s been crimped into two tabs for Games and drivers.

The ShadowPlay recording has been rolled into a single service called “Share”, which is accessible through the not-entirely-recognisable icon in the top right that’s a little reminiscent of the Unity logo. It’s a triangle instead of the Unity cube, but you get the idea.

When you open up the Share tab, you get a fullscreen overlay rather than a separate window. (For those wondering, my desktop background is from the excellent galleries on Dead End Thrills.)

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It’s a little more convoluted from the way ShadowPlay is currently organised. And while it’s nice to have all the features rolled into one, I can imagine some gamers would prefer having it all pop up in a separate window rather than a Steam or Windows 10 DVR-style overlay.

But being forced to create an account before you can optimise, stream or record your games will grate some gamers the wrong way. I tried using the software without logging in, but to no avail. NVIDIA does try to simplify the registration process by letting users link their Google account, but if you’re antsy about having to hand over your personal information after already handing over hundreds of dollars, that’s not going to placate you.

It’s a bit of a shame. The update is the first real overhaul of GeForce Experience’s UI and visuals, and it looks real good. The layout of the Share menu will take a little getting used to, but people will undoubtedly learn fairly quick. After all, it’s a lot easier to register for an NVIDIA account than recording through Open Broadcaster Software.

Source: Kotaku

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Re: The Video Card Thread

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AMD's Response To The Radeon RX 480 Issues Is Interesting

After fuelling hype to insane expectations, AMD has run into a little trouble with the launch of the Radeon RX 480 graphics card. People first discovered that the RX 480 was pulling more power from the PCI Express slot than the official specification allowed, and then reviewers found a way to basically unlock extra memory on the baseline 4GB reference cards.

Overnight, AMD has given the public an update on both issues — and their response is, well, interesting.

Let’s start with the first and more concerning topic with the RX 480: power. AMD promised they would have an update today about a fix to the card’s power usage, after reviewers found it was being a little bit greedy.

Not only did some reviewers notice that the RX 480 was pulling more from the PCIe slot than the specification officially allows, some units were also pulling more power on average than the 150W AMD quoted. Nothing substantial and nothing that would harm your PC, but not a good look nonetheless.

Even more surprising was when one publication successfully found a way, and published the means for users, to convert a retail 4GB AIB model of the RX 480 into a completely functional 8GB card. It involved voiding the card’s warranty and using software to flash the GPU’s BIOS, but it worked.

Obviously, AMD would prefer users didn’t do that. “AMD does not authorize any modifications to the firmware on Radeon graphics boards. Unauthorised changes to the BIOS or firmware on a 4GB and/or 8GB boards will nullify and void the warranty on the board,” the company said in a statement via email.

They also revealed that only one reference design of the RX 480 has been made, in a bid to reduce costs and accelerate production of the card:

To speed time-to-market in response to stronger than anticipated customer and gamer demand for the world’s first SEP $199 graphics cards capable of delivering premium VR experiences, we have chosen to leverage a single reference design for the initial 4GB and 8GB versions of the RX 480. By having a single reference design with identical physical dimensions and components, our partners are able to offer SEP $199 “Polaris”-based graphics cards for sale on June 29th. We expect RX 480 4GB-specific designs that differ from the current reference design to come to market later this summer in high volumes.

I’ve bolded the above there because it highlights a problem that AMD can’t fix. If the 4GB reference cards have the same components as their 8GB models, then the only thing stopping users from flashing their cheaper cards into more powerful 8GB versions is concerns over warranty and a lack of technical know-how.

It’s hard to really characterise it as a stuff-up on AMD’s part. If you think about it in practice, it means that $US199 — or a minimum of $320 here — is really all you have to pay for a VR-capable card. AMD’s partners and vendors might not be too chuffed though, particularly those in Australia selling 8GB reference cards that just got supplanted by their cheaper cousins.

For those who have already forked out for a reference card, however, you’ll be pleased to know that new drivers are on the way. Version 16.7.1 “will be released to the public in the next 48 hours” and comes with a “collection of performance improvements”. We’re not talking gargantuan improvements here, only a bump of up to 3% at best.

But AMD says the jump will be enough to offset the impact of a new option: a “compatibility” toggle, disabled by default, which reduces the RX 480’s overall power usage. It will be available through the Global Settings section of the Radeon software.

It’s worth noting that once the market gets flooded with third-party designs later this year, you won’t be able to simply flash your 4GB card into a faster, fancier 8GB model. Manufacturers will simply ship versions of the card with four 1GB memory chips instead of eight — after all, they’re not silly enough to throw money out the door. So you won’t be able to simply flash your video card into an 8GB model, and you’ll probably end up bricking your video card if you try.

For those lucky enough to get a reference 4GB card, it’s hard to not see this as a great deal. You’re already getting a decent 1080p and 1440p card for a low price, and in a way this just makes the RX 480 an even better purchase. That’s probably not how AMD envisioned the marketing would work out, but I’m sure gamers who scored a 4GB board will mind.

Source: Kotaku

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