Rx480. Competition BACK in the GPU market...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview/4
All round. Price. Cool. Performance.
It's not perfect. But the price, it doesn't have to be. It's the first salvo' in the true, 'long time coming'...next gen' GPU battle.
Last year's enthusiast performance at a very mainstream price. More so for the 4gig card. 8 gigs Vram on a mainstream card? Just wow.
AMD going after Nvidia on a smaller die, in the 80% gpu market. I hope they get back share and profit share.
Very good card for the price.
For myself, the holy grail is 4K performance at 60fps minimum and in that regard I find the NV 1080 disappointing.
I'm waiting for Vega to see what comes. AMD maybe keeping it's powder dry. Nv will have to respond to the RX480.
I'm tending to think the '2nd round' of GPU cards on this process node will get us to where we need to be for 4k/5k performance. Also with HDR monitors up in the air to a degree.
I'm thinking that 2017, the 'fall' might be the time to buy the next iMac.
Unless a compelling and 'not insanely' priced Mac Pro lands sooner.
Lemon Bon Bon.
All round. Price. Cool. Performance.
It's not perfect. But the price, it doesn't have to be. It's the first salvo' in the true, 'long time coming'...next gen' GPU battle.
Last year's enthusiast performance at a very mainstream price. More so for the 4gig card. 8 gigs Vram on a mainstream card? Just wow.
AMD going after Nvidia on a smaller die, in the 80% gpu market. I hope they get back share and profit share.
Very good card for the price.
For myself, the holy grail is 4K performance at 60fps minimum and in that regard I find the NV 1080 disappointing.
I'm waiting for Vega to see what comes. AMD maybe keeping it's powder dry. Nv will have to respond to the RX480.
I'm tending to think the '2nd round' of GPU cards on this process node will get us to where we need to be for 4k/5k performance. Also with HDR monitors up in the air to a degree.
I'm thinking that 2017, the 'fall' might be the time to buy the next iMac.
Unless a compelling and 'not insanely' priced Mac Pro lands sooner.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Comments
Open GL has been described as inferior and outdated. It's behind on Windows. It's behind on the Mac. More so.
Metal is closer to the 'metal' of the GPU card without a layer of middleware in the way. Sure, MS is also going this route. But surely the gap will be narrower with Apple in charge of its own destiny. It will take time to mature but sooner or later, Mac gaming companies will have to get behind it and it will soon deliver on its initial promise.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20043464897
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amd-confirms-rx-480-at-199-usd-other-apu-polaris-announcements.1975249/
Lemon Bon Bon.
Lemon Bon Bon.
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1060-specifications-benchmarks-leaked
One edge NVidia has is with the software developers. Custom APIs like VRWorks give them big performance gains. Price is estimated to be around $250.
AMD has had a win with the consoles and the upcoming console refreshes will use their newer hardware: XBox One S (Scorpio) (late 2016), PS4 Neo (October 2016), Nintendo NX (March 2017).
https://www.amazon.com/Xbox-One-S-500GB-Console/dp/B01GW3GY3K
The XBox One S is noted to be about 6TFLOPs so probably based on similar hardware to the 480. They are aiming for 4x the performance of current consoles to handle 4K and VR.
AMD's strategy of going after the low-end will be to try and boost unit volume vs per-unit revenue but long-term it's a contracting market:
http://jonpeddie.com/publications/add-in-board-report
"We have been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987—the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units, in 2015, 44 million shipped."
When you sell new hardware that performs like last year's hardware, the people who bought last year aren't going to upgrade to this year's hardware and people can even get last year's hardware at a discount.
AMD is under a mountain of debt just now (>$2b) and Polaris is probably their last chance to turn things around. Their shareholder debt is $0.5b, if Polaris doesn't stop that debt growing, they'll probably try to scale the company down and sell parts of it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices (see revenue numbers on the right)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia
AMD has pretty strong revenue results vs NVidia if the marketshare is accurate as AMD made $3.9b last year vs $5b for NVidia but their gross profit numbers are much lower (close to 1/3) so NVidia is getting away with selling their GPUs at a higher premium.
You can see this effect with the Mac Pro where at launch they bundled two powerful AMD GPUs for a competitive price and people still wanted NVidia to be able to run CUDA software. Apple does this with their own OS and apps, which help sell the hardware vs PCs and other mobile products.
AMD is doing what the Android smartphone manufacturers do which is drop the price to either hit a higher volume on the low-end or offer higher spec products at comparable price points to competitors on the high-end and all that happens is the high profit margins go to the manufacturers that can command the premium at the high-end.
They are getting eroded away at the lower-end too by Intel. Laptops make up most PC sales and a lot of them now skip dedicated altogether and this will just get worse. Apple now sells a single laptop with a dedicated GPU and it starts at $2500.
It's still good news for consumers because GPUs are still getting faster and cheaper but the demand for high-end GPU manufacturers is going to drop to unsustainable levels. Once inexpensive integrated chips can handle Star Wars Battlefront scenes at VR quality, which will happen within 2 or 3 generations, game developers aren't going to be held back by the hardware.
They can scan physical data and get it to look just like the real world, which is all they'll ever need.
AMD has been around for 47 years so other tech companies will likely want to support them if things get really rough but there's not much they can do. AMD has to ship a high enough volume to stay relevant and that costs billions. Even companies like Apple can't spend billions every year to support AMD at a loss. I think it makes the most sense for them to end up being a part of NVidia. There's no point in them competing with each other any more when the market is drying up. Why split the revenue between them when NVidia can get their $4b at a higher margin and consumers will be happier with having more compatible GPUs. The prices might be higher but they'll have to stay competitive with Intel's integrated chips.
If NVidia invested $2b, they'd get controlling interest in AMD and they could set their margins. If people don't buy AMD, they'll buy NVidia anyway. They can even have AMD ship NVidia's GPUs and get them in consoles, which lets them push their VR SDK on console and PC. They'll make back their investment from the higher margin sales. It's less risky for them to just wait it out but they are missing out on higher margin sales now while there's still some demand for enthusiast GPU hardware.
There is nothing particularly special about the RX 480. Even the Price/Performance isn't that great when you look at opportunity cost. A 8-10% cost savings coupled to a punishing 30-40% reduction in performance over the GTX-1070. Time Cook needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some nvidia chips back in Apple hardware.
The Mac hasn't seen such a sad state since the days of John Scully, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio...
You have a point there.
'Choice.'
Lemon Bon BOn.