Graphic Cards Radeon 300 series launch date & pricing

Here's another link that shows it matching the titan o_O. either way, it's not the giant leap i thought it would be. sadness :(.
http://wccftech.com/amd-fury-digitialstorm-review-leaked-dead-heat-titan/

i guess lower temps and smaller form factor are fury's usp.
Ultimately the real loser here is the titan as there's no reason (outside of 12gb vram) to get it anymore.

Wanted to add this - it looks like the fury is not all what it was hyped up to be. aside from having a review embargo right until product shipment, amd is now pulling review samples - not good signs. they already delayed launch and it looks like they are now in damage control mode.
http://www.kitguru.net/site-news/an...-kitguru-fury-x-sample-over-negative-content/
http://www.eteknix.com/things-go-from-bad-to-worse-for-reviews-of-amd-radeon-fury-x/
 
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^Lol those are wannabe journos, never even heard of eteknix until now. There's also a shitstorm on over at kitguru, let's just wait for some legit reviews.
 
Leaving the media and PR politics aside, AMD would be in a real soup if Fury X is not consistently superior to 980 Ti in performance by at least some significant amount in majority of the game benchmarks.

nVidia has been overpricing their GPUs for lack of competition and already made a ton of money of the 9xx line. If required they can drop the price by $50~100 on the 980Ti over night without blinking an eyelid. I don't think AMD can afford to match any good price reductions for the Fury X at this point.


Just looked at the Toms Hardware review and it looks like Fury X is mostly just on par with 980 Ti.
Looking at the Guru 3D reviews, its inferior to 980 Ti in most games at least till QHD resolutions. At UHD, its on par or better in some games.

Still, even for future UHD gaming, this card is crippled due to 4GB VRAM even if it has the computational power.

Definitely not looking good for AMD.

[DOUBLEPOST=1435150381][/DOUBLEPOST]Guru 3d review

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review,1.html
 
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Lord Nemesis said:
If required they can drop the price by $50~100 on the 980Ti over night without blinking an eyelid.
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They can but they wont... here's my logic,
The 970 is basically a binned 980 and the 980ti is a binned titan right? so while the 970 was launched at an aggressive price it never got any discounts (even after the 3.5gb issue). i'm expecting the same treatment for the 980ti i.e. good launch price (compared to titan) and no discounts ever :(
only the 980 got a $50 cut which seems quite irrelevant now as most would rather pay the extra money and get the ti or save a huge chunk of it and go with a 970.
in fact i'm pretty sure that had the fury launched at say $600 nvidia would still keep the 980ti's price at $650.

Also, amd taped out production at the beginning of the year itself (perhaps even earlier) and there haven't been any reports of yield issues with either fiji or hbm modules.
HBM is cheaper to produce than gddr5 over the long run and is already in full scale production. they're already working on the 400 series (arctic islands).
as for the 300/200/7xxx series - they've been in production on the same node since the ice age so they're probably being made at low a cost as would ever be possible.
thus, a price cut won't necessarily leave amd out of the race.

Bottom-line is that both CAN give us discounts but since they know it won't kill off the other they will keep prices the same.
Instead of competing on price i think we'll start seeing both pushing their respective game bundles.
 
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Good card as expected going by the reviews. Definitely worth getting if you're looking for something from this segment. Runs cooler and quieter and performance is in the same range as the 980Ti, WC out of the box is a big plus to get some extra horsepower as well.
Sure it draws in 20w more but what's the use of all those 800w PSUs and an extra 15$ to your annual power bill when you're already burning up 650 on a gpu.

Personally i'm a little disappointed since the rest of the range are just rebrands, I was looking at getting a newer architecture in the sub enthusiast segment but it's the same 3 year old gpus from 380 and below and the Hawaii rebrands seem a bit overpriced.
They definitely need to step up their game soon though, 2016 is a crucial year for them both in the cpu and gpu departments. If they mess up Zen or the 4xx mainstream cards where volume sales lie it'll just end up hurting us consumers.

Personally I'm f**ked since I was holding out until these cards are out, now there's no good mid-ranger except for the 970, don't know how i feel about paying 24k for a card that's been out for an entire year.
Still looking forward to the Fury Nano but no idea when they'll release that one, fingers crossed it's in the next 2-3 months.
 
Crapmypants said:
They can but they wont... here's my logic,
The 970 is basically a binned 980 and the 980ti is a binned titan right? so while the 970 was launched at an aggressive price it never got any discounts (even after the 3.5gb issue). i'm expecting the same treatment for the 980ti i.e. good launch price (compared to titan) and no discounts ever :(
only the 980 got a $50 cut which seems quite irrelevant now as most would rather pay the extra money and get the ti or save a huge chunk of it and go with a 970.
in fact i'm pretty sure that had the fury launched at say $600 nvidia would still keep the 980ti's price at $650.
Click to expand...

Looking at the benchmarks, nvida doesn't even need to think about a price drop. Fury X does not seem to have any major edge over the 980 Ti. Its performing below 980Ti at resolutions up to QHD and even though its somewhat computationally better at UHD like the other R9 series, the 4GB VRAM is going to drag it down for future games with higher res textures where VRAM requirements will go in excess of 4GB.

On top of that, with the step motherly treatment from many game developers and nVidia gameworks and other such stuff going on, its going to be an uphill battle for AMD even with the same price point.

If any thing, a redeeming factor would have been better computational performance which does show at UHD, but its sad that its compromised with 4GB VRAM. I would rather that this card used 8GB GDDR than HBM with its current limitations.

Crapmypants said:
Also, amd taped out production at the beginning of the year itself (perhaps even earlier) and there haven't been any reports of yield issues with either fiji or hbm modules.
HBM is cheaper to produce than gddr5 over the long run and is already in full scale production. they're already working on the 400 series (arctic islands).
as for the 300/200/7xxx series - they've been in production on the same node since the ice age so they're probably being made at low a cost as would ever be possible.
thus, a price cut won't necessarily leave amd out of the race.
Click to expand...

There are reports all over the internet about poor yields of HBM memory over the last couple of months. It was also stated that 390X (which till a while back was thought to be the HBM based flagship) would be in short supply due to the yield issues. Not sure if its true or not, but such reports were definitely there. Also if you look at the articles from last couple of days, you will see that AMD does not even have enough cards to give for benchmarks. Read in one of the the articles that they have only 10 cards to give for reviews over the whole EU region. Further more these cards have liquid cooling which would also add to the cost to some extent. I don't think they would be on equal footing to reduce prices if it comes to that. They might do it, but they will also be taking a hit to their margins much more than nVidia might.

AMD is already in the hole by 5~6 generations when it comes to CPU's to the point that Intel does not even consider AMD to be competition any more and is busy competing with ARM based technology. So its going to be even more rough riding for AMD going forward.
 
psyph3r said:
Still looking forward to the Fury Nano but no idea when they'll release that one, fingers crossed it's in the next 2-3 months.
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Don't hold your breath for it. I think if AMD has not even decided on the specs for Fury Nano, its not going to be out in next 2~3 months, I don't think even the normal Fury would be out within that time frame. My understanding is that Fury X would be released first and if the yield issue rumors are true, it might take some time for availability to stabilize even for that card.
 
Hardocp in its conclusion has made exactly the same points that I was making about HBM. With the current technical constraint, it would have been better for AMD to put in 8GB of GDDR than 4GB of HBM Memory. For a card that was advertised as the pinnacle for UHD gaming, having 4GB of VRAM was extremely short-sighted regardless of all the PR they put out.

980 Ti, Titan X and Radeon 390X are the real UHD ready cards. Fury X cannot IMO be considered as a card designed for UHD gaming.

HBM is limited right now in its first iteration to just 4GB of VRAM on a single GPU. We think the decision to constrain your flagship high-end video card, at a $649 price point, with only 4GB of VRAM today is a shortsighted, confusing and ultimately bottlenecking choice.

It is the wrong move to make. 4GB constrains and limits the potential of your flagship high-end video card especially at the resolution and display sizes the AMD Radeon Fury X are being marketed as excelling at, 4K.

Instead, we think the better choice would have been to implement HBM on the mid-range card product stack, at cards $400 and below, where 4GB of VRAM is better positioned for the performance of the video card. At the high-end, especially for $649, 6GB should be the bare minimum today, and in fact 8GB would be very forward looking and preferred.
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We had a recent discussion with AMD regarding the merits of VRAM and 4K gaming. We posed a direct question to AMD to talk about the differences in VRAM between the less expensive AMD Radeon R9 390X with 8GB and the more expensive AMD Radeon R9 Fury X with half the VRAM at 4GB. Given the fact that both video cards are promoted as "4K" gaming video cards we wanted AMD's direct response to share here.

"Note that HBM and GDDR5 memory sized can’t be directly compared. Think of it like comparing an SSD’s capacity to a mechanical hard drive’s capacity. As long as both capacities are sufficient to hold local data sets, much higher performance can be achieved with HBM, and AMD is hand tuning games to ensure that 4GB will not hold back Fiji’s performance. Note that the graphics driver controls memory allocation, so its incorrect to assume that Game X needs Memory Y. Memory compression, buffer allocations, and caching architectures all impact a game’s memory footprint, and we are tuning to ensure 4GB will always be sufficient for 4K gaming. Main point being that HBM can be thought of as a giant embedded cache, and is not directly comparable to GDDR5 sizes."

You can compare GDDR5 capacity with VRAM capacity of HBM memory. If the GPU runs out of VRAM, what happens in both scenarios? It has to swap out of memory, no matter if it is GDDR5 or HBM, the result is the same.

AMD has already proven to us that VRAM capacity matters for 4K. AMD has equipped a standard 8GB of VRAM on the AMD Radeon R9 390 and 390X as a move to promote those video cards for 4K gaming. You cannot now divide that VRAM in half on your flagship video card and claim it is also built for 4K gaming after you've proven VRAM capacity matters. While HBM offers a much higher bandwidth, the bandwidth is nowhere near high enough to offset the loss in VRAM capacity in our opinion. More testing at 4K and with our new AMD GPUs in CrossFire will give us more clarity on this going forward and we are surely going to investigate this.
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NVIDIA sought to up the GeForce GTX 980 Ti to 6GB and the TITAN X to 12GB. This is where a video card needs to be if you are aiming for a video card that is quote: "built for 4K." No current amount of memory bandwidth is going to overcome the physical limitation of VRAM.
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http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/06/24/amd_radeon_r9_fury_x_video_card_review/11#.VYrb8PmqpHw
 
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Lord Nemesis said:
There are reports all over the internet about poor yields of HBM memory over the last couple of months. It was also stated that 390X (which till a while back was thought to be the HBM based flagship) would be in short supply due to the yield issues. Not sure if its true or not, but such reports were definitely there. Also if you look at the articles from last couple of days, you will see that AMD does not even have enough cards to give for benchmarks. Read in one of the the articles that they have only 10 cards to give for reviews over the whole EU region. Further more these cards have liquid cooling which would also add to the cost to some extent. I don't think they would be on equal footing to reduce prices if it comes to that. They might do it, but they will also be taking a hit to their margins much more than nVidia might.
Click to expand...

You're right. i remember reading articles on hbm and how the way it's made lessens the chance of yield issues and didn't look further than that. did some more googling and they say only 30k units of fury will ship this year. so yea, supply issues on both fury and the 390. i would have thought they took care of that after they delayed launch.

knowing all this now it's hard to wonder why they didn't push fiji back to 2016 and focus on hawaii.
one thing that stands out among the reviews is the 295x2. it's literally a dinosaur - old and epic. (look at it's frametimes!)
if they went all out on hawaii :-
they could sell a liquid cooled 8gb 290x as the 390 at $400 or whatever they're charging now.
used binned chips of the 390 for the 380x, (an 8gb version could target the 970 for 4k res. gaming)
double the ram on a 295x2 (i.e. use two 390's), call it the 395x2 and sell that as a titan rival. the 295x2 sells for ~$700 (msrp is $800) so amd could match the titan's price.
binned 290's could also be put in a dual gpu 380 (as a 385x2) and compete against the 980ti. i.e mass produce one chip to take on 3 cards.
if amd knew they weren't going to match the efficiency of maxwell then why bother with the hype? what idiot thinks "hmmm, that product is not what it was hyped up to be - i must buy it!"
while i understand that a dual-gpu card is not to everyone's liking and it has it's own issues but how could amd not realize that the same architecture won't be able keep the single-gpu performance crown for half a !@#$%^&* decade.
even a dual gpu 270 would be fast and relatively better value than the 380 as its the cheapest xfire capable card.
if they wanted to charge more then have water cooled versions. atleast the image of gcn being too hot for the average case would subside a bit.
they would have had a year more to develop fiji and still have it out before pascal. at the least yield and supply issues could have been sorted out.
amd would have better '4k gaming' bragging rights than it does now.
 
^^ There is nothing wrong about releasing the Fury line this year minus the use of HBM. HBM with its current limitations is not ready for the big time. They should have simply slapped on 8 GB of GDDR, remove the water cooling and sell the card at $500, maybe even $550 and AMD would have had an absolute winner on their hands. There never was any need for them to pretend or proclaim to be the king of the hill.

Not everybody looks for the top of the line cards while disregarding the cost involved. Most sane and neutral people will look at the overall value and AMD would have had the chance to triumph there.

This was the sole reason my last 3 GPU purchases prior to GTX980 were all AMD. AMD was not the king of the hill, but offered better value in the market.
 
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