Well, that was pretty poor, I was hoping it would at least come between the 390 and the 390x, oh well...
I almost picked up a 390 for £199 from Overclockers this morning but decided not to, looks like that was a bad decision. I made the same mistake when the 290X's were heavily discounted the day before the 390X reviews went live
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview
Well, it's roughly on par with 390/390x at 1080p. It falls short at 1440p in many cases, however. I wonder if this might be at least partially due to having half the ROPs.
It's also almost half the power consumption of 390/390x.
[rest is general reply to everything else since reviews released]
I'm with Rys on this. It's somewhat disappointing considering the hype leading up to this, but sticking with comparisons to AMD's own past products it's not bad. And given the price (at least until we see what Nvidia responds with) it's the best product you can get at that price point.
It'd be good enough for me if it was more consistent at 1440p. If I was still gaming at 1080p/1200p, I'd likely buy this immediately.
Compared to Pascal, it's obviously not as good architecturally.
The most disappointing thing to me is that it appears they've likely clocked this past the knee of the power curve similar to Fury X, which while increasing the performance makes the perf/W significantly worse as well. Fiji at those clocks had terrible perf/W while Fiji at Nano clocks had decent perf/W. I think we're seeing something similar here. If there's any disappointment to be had, it's likely based around this.
At what AMD were probably hoping to target it's clockspeed, it likely did have up to 2.8x perf/W. But clocked past the knee of the curve, it's only about 2x perf/W. Either that or the results from Global Foundries 14 nm FF implementation were significantly worse than they expected. Perhaps the 2.8x perf/W came from a test sample at Samsung or simulated using characteristics from Samsung 14 nm FF. Somewhat reasonable considering GF is used shared tech. But implementation varies, and it's possible GF did a lot worse with it than Samsung did.
Either way. ~2x perf/W (compared to 390/390x) for an equivalent gaming performance is still respectable. Sure AMD could have done better. But they also could have done a lot worse.
But, yes, as Rys mentioned, too much reliance on pre-product release hype from 3rd party websites (Videocardz/WCCF/Etc.) greatly inflated expectations for a card targeted at the 199 USD price point.
I admit, I also fell for some of that hype. But I am also not a slave to the hype and can look at this somewhat more objectively. It's not what AMD wanted and it doesn't live up to the 2.8x perf/W. But it pretty much delivers on everything else that AMD promised, which was to bring VR capable performance down to mainstream prices.
And hell, what did most people on this forum say when AMD had better perf/W than Nvidia? Perf/W doesn't matter in a shipping product.
I also, am shocked at people's response to this. Not as shocked as Rys, as I was expecting some of this from certain people, but still shocked at how many people appear to be overreacting.
Disappointing certainly. But all this vitriol. Dang.
Regards,
SB