R9 270x/280x vs 7950/7970

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limitedaccess

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Any compelling reasons to wait for the R9 270x/280x? Particularly the 270x vs the 7950?

At the moment the R9 270x seems to be worse then the 7950 at essentially the same price point (given current 7950 street prices).
 
Worse? what do you mean? Preliminary benchmarks are showing utter badassness? Im confused as hell.. In fact I took my 7970ghz edition out and put my water cooled 6990 back in because it was faster than the 7970 in almost every game.

I am super excited at something that will crush my 6990 use half the power and make games even smoother since it will be a single GPU solution.
 
Are there leaked benchmarks for the 270x and 280x? I'm not referring to the 290x. The 270x and 280x do not seem to be cut down versions of the 290x and at the moment. Is it even likely they are new architectures using GCN 2.0?

Based on the information released by AMD -

R9 280X - 3GB GDDR5, $299, > 6800 in Firestrike

R9 270X - 2GB GDDR5, $199, > 5500 Firestrike

Compared to existing Firestrike scores for example - http://www.legitreviews.com/powercolor-hd7870-devil-2gb-video-card-review_2244/9 (just the first link in search)

By comparison price wise for me 7950s are available at $210. 7970s at $260. 7870s at $160.

I also wonder if the 270x will be slotted into a lower bundle tier?
 
I am debating buying one 290X or getting a second 7950. What I'm going to do is see what performance boost this Mantle thing gives the Radeon GPU in BF4. Bypassing DirectX 11 and rendering directly to the GPU sounds badass. The sound card built into the GPU also sounded like something that I'd want. But I can get a second 7950 for $250 or so. If I got one it would have to be something that I can overclock to at least 1000 / 1500.
 
I feel pretty much the same way. Even though Firestrike isn't exactly the best benchmark, it can give you a rough idea of performance. And the R9 280X seems like basically a rebadged 7970, for about the same price ($300). My overclocked 7950 (1100/1400) gets 7200 in Firestrike (8000 GPU score), and it can be had right now for <$200.

The R9 290X seems like the only interesting one, though we'll see how it performs in actual benchmarks (plus the final price).

This seems like a fairly uneventful refresh/rebadge. Probably not much of a reason to upgrade if you already have a 7950 or 7970. I might just get a second 7950 for Xfire.
 
I want to say the lower scores is the result of "a driver issue for new set of cards", although the 2GB on 270 is rather surprising.

I can't imagine 270 or 280 being slower than 7950/7970 on the hardware level. Although I am rather curious whether 280 is "faster than 7970 but slower than 7970ghz".
 
Glad someone else asked this. Debating pulling my card off the market and just putting it in my PC. I wouldn't mind spending a bit for a nice upgrade, but if the rumors are correct and the R9 290X is going to be 600 bucks and gets nearly Titan performance, selling the card I have on hand and using that cash + whatever out of pocket for 10-30 FPS when I'm already hitting the 60 frames marks seems like a bit of a waste (not overkill, this IS [H] after all).

Considering the market, I'd likely get my card sold at $270-$300 (if I'm lucky) and STILL have to throw another 300 bucks into a new card. Eh, those 7970s are looking better as I keep thinking about it. Too bad they run so warm.
 
According to the leaks. only the 290, and 290x are new, everything else is Tahiti, and Bonnaire.
 
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Speculating on this at the moment seems completely silly, there aren't any real confirmed hard numbers out there and you would have to be pretty crazy to make a choice based on speculation and leaks.
 
All this Mantle business sounds nice and all, but how useful is it really when only 1 game will be using it by december? Perhaps a couple years down the road when a few more game engines have embraced it.

all i care about is DX performance, as those are the games i play.
 
I've been thinking about getting a 7950 (or possibly a 7970 with the prices now, or even a 7870) as a somewhat stop gap upgrade for a 560ti which is what this thread is related to.

What I was worried about is a poor replacement for the 7950 in its market segment with the new refresh and right now with the information available it seems like it might be true.

Kor said:
Speculating on this at the moment seems completely silly, there aren't any real confirmed hard numbers out there and you would have to be pretty crazy to make a choice based on speculation and leaks.
Click to expand...

The issue is stock of the 7950/7970 may cease to exist in retail channels. I remember this issue with the 5770 replacing the 4870 awhile back for instance (and not being able to find 4870s anymore), where the 5770 was retailing at the same price as the outgoing 4870s. At least in that case the 5770 was considerably more efficient and had a improved feature set (DX11). If speculation on the 270x is correct then it won't have those advantages while having less VRAM than the 7950. Could be a terrible situation for buyers in the ~$200 bracket by missing out on the 7950 for the 270x.

The 280x vs 7970/7970ghz at least somewhat appears to be a wash depending on what kind of sale price you can finding currently on a 7970.

HFBallad said:
I want to say the lower scores is the result of "a driver issue for new set of cards", although the 2GB on 270 is rather surprising.

I can't imagine 270 or 280 being slower than 7950/7970 on the hardware level. Although I am rather curious whether 280 is "faster than 7970 but slower than 7970ghz".
Click to expand...

The scores aren't really lower. The 280x scores is in the ball park of the 7970/7970 ghz edition (the MSI 7970 in the review I posted is clocked higher than the stock 7970 ghz edition). While the 270x numbers seem to comparable to that of the 7870 LEs (eg. 7870 Myst using the Tahiti LE chips).

The Mac said:
According to the leaks. only the 290, and 290x are new, everything else is Tahiti, and Bonnaire.
Click to expand...

So Pitcarin is being completely dropped possibly? Perhaps the 270x is a Tahiti LE (hence the 2gb using a 256 bit bus possibly), the Firestrike score I believe is roughly comparable.

The Mac said:
All this Mantle business sounds nice and all, but how useful is it really when only 1 game will be using it by december? Perhaps a couple years down the road when a few more game engines have embraced it.

all i care about is DX performance, as those are the games i play.
Click to expand...

Mantle won't really be a factor in this comparison since it supposedly will work on all GCN cards. Even more so if the 270x/280x are indeed rebadges. Unless they do something shady by crippling or poorly supporting the older cards.
 
Joga said:
7850 seems to be right in between the price and performance of the R9 270X ($200, 5500 Firestrike) and R7 260X ($140, 3700 Firestrike).
Click to expand...
So... If I want a 7850, which is the best card in the 180€ / $240 range, for modern game performance per power consumption, I need to buy a 7850 now while they're still available?

Blergh. I was totally expecting a replacement.
 
I decided not to wait and got a used Sapphire 7950 with the 7970 reference cooler off ebay for $155 shipped. Got it today and I'm quite satisfied. I see no point in waiting. New gen cards are almost always poor value for equal performance of current gen cards at current street prices.
 
limitedaccess said:
Are there leaked benchmarks for the 270x and 280x? I'm not referring to the 290x. The 270x and 280x do not seem to be cut down versions of the 290x and at the moment. Is it even likely they are new architectures using GCN 2.0?

Based on the information released by AMD -

R9 280X - 3GB GDDR5, $299, > 6800 in Firestrike

R9 270X - 2GB GDDR5, $199, > 5500 Firestrike

Compared to existing Firestrike scores for example - http://www.legitreviews.com/powercolor-hd7870-devil-2gb-video-card-review_2244/9 (just the first link in search)

By comparison price wise for me 7950s are available at $210. 7970s at $260. 7870s at $160.

I also wonder if the 270x will be slotted into a lower bundle tier?
Click to expand...

Can low firestrike scores be caused by using non overclocked AMD CPU on the test platform ?

Since most review sites will use overclocked i7 for testing.
 
Michaelius said:
Can low firestrike scores be caused by using non overclocked AMD CPU on the test platform ?

Since most review sites will use overclocked i7 for testing.
Click to expand...

Many reasons, pre-release drivers being among them. We won't really know until enthusiasts start overclocking them, etc.
 
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