AMD GPU Generational Performance Part 2 @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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AMD GPU Generational Performance Part 2

Ever wonder how much performance you are really getting from GPU to GPU upgrade in games? What if we took GPUs from AMD and compared performance gained from 2013 to 2018? This is our AMD GPU Generational Performance Part 2 article focusing on the Radeon R9 280X, Radeon R9 380X, Radeon RX 480 and Radeon RX 580 in 15 games.

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I understand more performance is always nice, but I think the RX 480/580 are already in quite a good position for their 1080p target market. Looking at the averages, it's rare they drop under 60fps and more often than not average frame rates are significantly higher.

Until more demanding game engines come out that can't get near 60fps @1080p or 1440p becomes the new entry level I can't see much point in making these mainstream cards a lot faster than they already are.
 
It's true that performance hasn't really changed very much from when I got my R9 290 for a bit over $400 to play Dragon Age: Inquisition (until Vega, that is), but now that same performance level can be had for half that price. That's the magic trick Polaris pulled off.
 
Now I understand your reluctance to put the 280x in the previosu article.

This is really interesting and still my almost 5 year old 280x can run modern games at medium settings which is good enough.

Slight typo issue on the Far Cry page where 390's are mentioned as below, otherwise, great stuff.

"
As you can see above the settings are playable on R9 290X and 390X. The Radeon R9 390X is only 1% faster than the R9 290X. Honestly, we expected more given that the R9 390X’s improved GCN architecture is better at tessellation.



We do once again see a big jump though with the RX 480 being 42% faster than the R9 390X. RX 580 is a small 4% faster than RX 480. UP to this point though, that’s the most difference we’ve seen between those two video cards."
 
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Thanks.

My R9 390 still does very well, both in game-playing and warming the room. ;)

No 'x' on my card, but if I don't bring it up, no one notices.
 
Thanks for the history. I've learned a lot about the other side of the fence I've so rarely visited these last 5-10 years. It also illuminates on the strategy of a company struggling with so many external factors I've heard about and trying to keep costs to a bare minimum while keeping production. Not always the best choices but at least they're still in the game. Here's hoping it just gets better moving forward.
 
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Nice - here's to hoping that the next iteration will see a similar, near 50% boost :) though... I'd hope for a lot more than that, but... what do ya do.
 
I bought a 7970 for a build back in 2011, my current 3930k system.

The only game I ever noticed a problem on was Rage, and with only one 7970, there was an incredible texture popping issue.

You really didn't notice it moving, but the longer you looked, the more detail would suddenly appear.

I upgraded to 2x crossfire 7970's, and the texture popping went away, and everything was much smoother.

The RX480 I replaced them with drinks less than half the power, and has no issues in anything I'm playing, as your excellent review shows.

I just have always wondered if the poor reception Rage got was due to the texture lag issues, that 8GB (well, >3GB) of memory clearly helps.

Great Article!
 
Great article. Very thorough. My R9 280x Strix is still performing great for me. I mostly play Overwatch and I can run the game with pretty much everything on high and locked at 75 fps for my refresh rate. It was a great buy for $200 a while back.
 
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Polaris rocks...there's just no other word for it. Given their modestly affordable prices, that translates into a whole lot of performance for the budget minded gamers out there looking to buy a solid midrange GPU.

Some may argue that a 1060 would be a better buy, given that it generally performs (ever so) slightly better in real world game reviews, but that also comes with a bit of a price premium (before rebates):

RX580 8GB: $220-270 ($190-250 after rebate)
1060 6GB: $250-280 ($250-270 after rebate)

Polaris wins their price segment right now.
 
So hopefully this means Navi midrange will be fast as Vega performance at the midrange price. AMD out of the high end game for now, hopefully they work towards beefing up the midrange offerings coming up. Looking forward to 7nm TSMC offerings
 
BTW, If you never played the original Far Cry with the 64-bit and HDR mods, you really might want to go back and check it out.

Trigens are even worse in HDR, lol.

Far Cry 4 is beautiful. The only thing I hate about it is the long drives, and the freaking animals eating me every time I line up a sniper shot, lol.

Seeing the women in that game makes me wonder how much they like Americans there... :)
 
I'm sorry, I don't pay much attention to reviews I suppose but is anything below 60fps not playable according to the reviewer? Crysis 3 on the 280X = 27fps lowest and 42fps average = Radeon R9 280X is not playable.

Huh? How? Seems pretty playable to me...then he lowers AA and gets 26fps lowest and 51fps average and now it's somehow playable?

Also in Far Cry 4 the 280 and 380 are referred to as the 290/390 a few times!
 
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I am pleased the 280X held up so well. While 50% is a big jump, over 5 years, not so much. By now I would have thought at least 100% would be the minimum. Just justification for me to hold off a little longer
 
Mut1ny said:
I'm sorry, I don't pay much attention to reviews I suppose but is anything below 60fps not playable according to the reviewer? Crysis 3 on the 280X = 27fps lowest and 42fps average = Radeon R9 280X is not playable.

Huh? How? Seems pretty playable to me...then he lowers AA and gets 26fps lowest and 51fps average and now it's somehow playable?

Also in Far Cry 4 the 280 and 380 are referred to as the 290/390 a few times!
Click to expand...

Some games are CAPPED at 30fps to avoid stutter issues.
 
Still have a 7970 in my HTPC. Works like a champ. Still plays almost anything I throw at it, albeit not at particularly high quality settings.
 
1920x1080 running TF2, R290 is just fine with me. Wake me up when something more interesting comes along. I'm still pissed COD:WAW was shut down. The new Doom was nice, and played very well on the 290 being Vulkan of course. Need more of that.

Thanks for the review work guys..
 
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I bought the 285, either right before or right after the 380x came out. At the time, the reviews I looked at showed it comparable, if not ahead of the 280x, but I was able to buy mine for $169 after MIR. With the few newer games I have (Rise of the Tomb Raider and DX: MD) I am feeling the limitation of 2GB vRAM, but it has otherwise been good for me. If prices come down a bit more though, I may go ahead and spring for a 580x, and see how high I can crank up the settings!

Brent_Justice - Was the DX Mankind Divided tested with DX11 or DX12? I noticed frame rate improvements and noticeably smoother gameplay when I turned on DX12.
 
jardows said:
Brent_Justice - Was the DX Mankind Divided tested with DX11 or DX12? I noticed frame rate improvements and noticeably smoother gameplay when I turned on DX12.
Click to expand...

IIRC he's already posted that DX11 was used unless it was stated it was DX12. Without the rest of your system specs discernible from your post it's not easy to say precisely why you noticed improvement.
 
Algrim said:
IIRC he's already posted that DX11 was used unless it was stated it was DX12. Without the rest of your system specs discernible from your post it's not easy to say precisely why you noticed improvement.
Click to expand...
It wasn't mentioned in the article, so I wasn't sure. With Sniper Elite showing a good generational improvement between the 280x and the 380x, I think it is a concept worth exploring.
 
Thanks Brent and Kyle. Love these articles, and very happy with the 480 I purchased for my son a few months ago for $100!
 
I had the R9 M390X which is a lower clocked esktop R9 380X and for being such small chip, its performance was more consistent than the R9 M290X aka desktop HD 7870 that it replaced. But now I have an RX 580 on my laptop and so impressed.
 
Should be interesting to see what the next release in this price segment is and when it will arrive.
 
Tonga is definately the red headed step child of the AMD gpus, especially the rx285. I always thoght it was a step back from Tahiti due to the loss in compute performance.
Having 6 gb would have helped, at least with Wolfenstein 2.
 
I had a Nitro 8g rx480 that would do 1400 core all day. I only sold it due to the mining craze making flipping it too good to pass up. I mean at nearly double what I paid everything is for sale! Very nice card for 1080p and I used it at 1440p with dialed in settings and was fine with it. I really like this series overall as it gives great info for those considering and upgrade or even buying a used card for that sweet bang for the buck.

Dug up my HWBot run for Catzilla


rx480.PNG
 
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Wolfenstein consumes insane amounts of VRAM. Just look at reviews that include Fury X vs RX480/580. The faster Fury X gets crushed by Polaris due to only having 4GB VRAM.

Also, if you replace 280X with 7970 in these benchmarks, THAT is a case of Fine Wine. A 2011 GPU still showing its relevance 5+ years later.
 
I would like to see how Polaris does against Hawaii. I am thinking Hawaii will actually do better on newer DX12 and Polaris will win with Vulkan and most Dx11. I would also like to see how the 295x2 holds up in newer games.
 
Nightfire said:
I would like to see how Polaris does against Hawaii. I am thinking Hawaii will actually do better on newer DX12 and Polaris will win with Vulkan and most Dx11. I would also like to see how the 295x2 holds up in newer games.
Click to expand...

I would think of the same thing but the biggest issue with Hawaii is its Tessellation performance and bandwidth bottleneck. I had an overclocked 290X and I would get high RAM controller utilization quite often on VSR/MSAA scenarios causing slowdowns when getting close to 90% of the RAM controller utilization, so even 512-Bits can be a bottleneck for 64 ROPs. There is quite a lot of underutilization with Hawaii that is hard to overcome mainly by these two limitations. Polaris is much better balanced having similar or better performance with less resources, so DX12 may give little gains to Polaris unless if there is a CPU bottleneck somewhere on the game with the oudated DX11 API.
 
evolucion8 said:
I would think of the same thing but the biggest issue with Hawaii is its Tessellation performance and bandwidth bottleneck. I had an overclocked 290X and I would get high RAM controller utilization quite often on VSR/MSAA scenarios causing slowdowns when getting close to 90% of the RAM controller utilization, so even 512-Bits can be a bottleneck for 64 ROPs. There is quite a lot of underutilization with Hawaii that is hard to overcome mainly by these two limitations. Polaris is much better balanced having similar or better performance with less resources, so DX12 may give little gains to Polaris unless if there is a CPU bottleneck somewhere on the game with the oudated DX11 API.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I didn't know about the tesselation bottleneck despite having high bandwidth on paper. I take it the 8gb models do not fair any better? Overall, the rx580-like gpu in the XB1X seems to work great and I am sure MS did their research.
 
Nightfire said:
Hmm, I didn't know about the tesselation bottleneck despite having high bandwidth on paper. I take it the 8gb models do not fair any better? Overall, the rx580-like gpu in the XB1X seems to work great and I am sure MS did their research.
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Yeah, AMD doubled the amount of Geometry processors but the performance gains were much smaller, like 15% compared to Tahiti, it got improved greatly on Polaris and then Vega. Both are so close that unless if you don't mind about heat and power consumption, Polaris seems like the better choice, but if you can find a cheaper 390X and don't care about the other stuff, its a good choice as well.
 
I don't see the refresh as a loss on RX series if the goal was to increase performance of the 570 as now we have a part that can replace the 290-290x at $200 and make money while we use way less power draw with refresh of GCN and Free Sync .. how is that disappointing?


As I only lose this much at stock settings why an 8 pin is disconnected is kind of a win in my book.

https://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/16505649/fs/16450288#
 
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I'm still running a 7950 running at about 1050mhz core.. only play 1080p.. will probably time an upgrade to a 4k monitor upgrade.
 
The fun of 87 hour weeks, I’ve just now got around to reading this article.

Great article! The big things I come away with is 7970GHz is a god tier card in terms of longevity. 6 years on and medium-high settings is unreal.

Secondly I really wonder how a 7970/280x 6GB would handle the Wolfenstein 2 VRAM issue.

Lastly being that, well since I’m not using my 1440 monitor (1080p Plasma instead) my 290x is pretty much still fantastic until Navi.
 
Nolan7689 said:
.... Secondly I really wonder how a 7970/280x 6GB would handle the Wolfenstein 2 VRAM issue.
Click to expand...

Agreed, this would be neat to see. I am willing to bet the trusty 7970 will crush it with 6 GB vram. They are just too rare to really make it worth the time.
 
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