AMD Radeon Live Blog - AMD Presents: The New Era of PC Gaming

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• Kutark - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

  This is exactly what i was going to say. My suspicion is Nvidia knew or highly suspected it was slower than the Titan X, and released the 980 ti at $650 to put them in a hard position. My suspicion is they wanted to charge 800-850 for this card and it be slightly slower than a Titan X, maybe 5-10%. My suspicion is they had to delay release so they could figure out a way to get it to "beat" the titan x/980ti. So, they did do a smart thing by releasing it "stock" as a watercooled solution. A lot of enthusiasts will think thats cool. The smart ones among us know they likely did this so they could "overclock" the chip they originally intended to aircool so that it could beat the titan x/980ti. Even if its only slightly. I highly doubt this chip will have much in the way of overclocking headroom.
  
  The other thing to consider is with a water cooled 980 ti, its cost ~$100 more than a reference card but is performing 15-20% better than the ref card, which means its gonna outperform the Fury X in a more apples to apples comparison (due to the water cooling) and justify the higher cost for the pre water cooled GM-200.

• chizow - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

  @Kutark, agree with this analysis to the tee. Its obvious Nvidia pre-emptively struck with the 980Ti to limit AMD's landing spots and taking that $850 mark off the table. We'll see what the final clocks and performance is, but my guess is we see the tables turn where AMD may win the lower resolutions but lose at the higher ones due to fewer ROPs than expected, 4GB limitation.

• AeroWB - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

  Sorry but I don't believe this. There are just too many factors that don't agree:
  A) AMD knew NVIDIA had a big gap between the Titan X and the 980. Add to this the fact that the Titan X uses a different (bigger) chip then the 980 with all units unlocked it was highly likely NVIDIA was going to release a product with a crippled Titan X chip around the Fury release.
  B) The watercooler reference design as stock cooler fopr the top card from this generation from AMD has popped up over the internet for a very long time. this is by no means a quick fix.
  C) They could have definately released the FuryX with a good air cooler with the same clocks, water coolers aren't so special as many people think.
  D) Nvidia has been launching new products or decreasing product pricing around AMD launches for a long time
  E) AMD knows its currrent 4GB limit for the Fury cards is a very important limitation that should be fixed soon. This is a disadvantage compared to the 980Ti/TitanX but also to their own 390/390X so this limits their potential price. If AMD were to launch the Fury at 850 USD while equipping the 390/390X with 8GB for half that price would have been a Joke. Either 8GB is BS and they are admitting it, or the Fury is very short lived product and they hope people are stupid and buy it still.
  F) AMD had always had an aggressive price compared to Nvidia. Look at the price/performance graphs from the last years and you will see AMD always has more good scores than Nvidia here. Nvidia is more relying on having other advantages like G-Sync, Phys-X acceleration etc.
  
  So to sum up, I don't believe:
  - the Fury was ever going to launch at 850
  - the water cooler was a late adjustment as a reaction on the 980Ti
  - AMD did not expect the 980Ti
  - AMD forgot that max 4GB is an important limitation for a new high-end product

• D. Lister - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

  C) That is impossible to determine, without the actual product available for testing.
  
  E) 4GB VRAM is pretty good, if you know how to use it. Problem is, AMD has apparently had an "exceedingly poor" way of handling VRAM in the past, and they tried compensating for it by putting more VRAM to make up for their inefficiency. Their marketing of course did its best to convince all the rubes that more VRAM was always better.
  
  "An obvious concern is the limit of 4GB of memory for the upcoming Fiji GPU – even though AMD didn’t verify that claim for the upcoming release, implementation of HBM today guarantees that will be the case. Is this enough for a high end GPU? After all, both AMD and NVIDIA have been crusading for larger and larger memory capacities including AMD’s 8GB R9 290X offerings released last year. Will gaming suffer on the high end with only 4GB? Macri (Joe Macri, Corporate Vice President and Product CTO at AMD) doesn’t believe so; mainly because of a renewed interest in optimizing frame buffer utilization. Macri admitted that in the past very little effort was put into measuring and improving the utilization of the graphics memory system, calling it “exceedingly poor.” The solution was to just add more memory – it was easy to do and relatively cheap. With HBM that isn’t the case as there is a ceiling of what can be offered this generation. Macri told us that with just a couple of engineers it was easy to find ways to improve utilization and he believes that modern resolutions and gaming engines will not suffer at all from a 4GB graphics memory limit."
  
  http://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/High-Ban...

• kyuu - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link

  I'm not sure why you think that poor usage of the graphics memory was an AMD-only problem based on that quote. They were plainly talking about the subject in general. Please keep anti-AMD biases out of your analysis. Your not Chizow so hopefully that's not an impossible request.

• chizow - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

  @AeroWB you make reasonable points, but ask yourself this. Would AMD really bother with the embarassment of rebranding their entire product stack to launch an "ultra-premium" brand that cost the same as their previous 290/X parts? It just doesn't make any sense. The only explanation that does make sense is that they had their eyes on a bigger prize, ie. the Titan.

• AeroWB - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link

  @chizow I think that AMD had too make a few though choices as their R&D budget is much smaller then that of Nvidia and Intel and creating a new chip is really expensive. The fact that all new GPU's are still 28nm is something that both Nvidia and AMD were not expecting a few years ago when they started designing the chips for say 2014/15. So they new chips we've seen this year are probably all designs that had to be sort of rushed which means either take a new design and scale it back to 28nm or take an existing design and improve or upscale it. AMD has had a big advantage here as they already had a lot of chips that could support DX12/Vulcan/FreeSync etc. So rebranding them was a reasonable and cheap option. AMD did not have an answer to its high power draw and didn't have a high end part to compete with the titan and so they decided to create one more GPU on 28nm with (almost) the same graphics cores as the latest version use in the R9 285 chip but now scale that chip to be really huge and to address the power draw add some more power features like target frame rate control, some power optimizations in the chip and HBM to top it off. With this approach they had to create only one new chip and at the same time develop HBM further so it can be used on the next generation of cards that will be at a new process node. Because the R&D cost of the 200 series chips have been earned back with current sales they can afford to drop the price and so be able to compete with Nvidia. Nvidia on the other hand had much more need to create a new 28nm part as their older chips were missing essential features for DX12/Vulcan so in order to fix this they had to design multiple new chips to cover the whole line-up. But instead of just "upgrading" their old core designs they did a big redesign which resulted in much less power hungry cards. Probably by integrating much of the tech they developed for the mobile parts. So both AMD and Nvidia made different decision on what to develop on another 28nm design and both choices sound very reasonable to me. Though I am, like a lot of people, disappointed the new 300 series are all rebrands as the Fiji is too expensive for me and I had hoped to pick up much better price/performance card than that was possible with the R9 290 (X) that I was going to buy. And now the new R9 390 (X) are only marginally better

• chizow - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link

  @AeroWB: I actually agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, I guess where we disagree is on the actual execution and pricing decisions for Fury. At this point its probably a moot point now, I just feel like 980Ti did really surprise AMD in both price and how close it performed to Titan X, greatly limiting their landing spots for the Fury X. It just doesn't make sense to me that AMD would go through the trouble of creating an Ultra Premium brand at $650 max when they already hit those price points with their standard R9 series in the past, while bringing on this rebranding scrutiny for the rest of their R9 300 series.

• Ranger101 - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

  Wow Chizow (shill) you're really ramping up the number of bullshit Anti AMD posts as
  the hard launch approaches. Guess you Nvidia employees must be a little nervous as the
  prospect of losing the performance crown approaches...keep it coming man, this is very amusing :)

• chizow - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

  Wow Ranger101 (fanboy), would be awesome if AMD just did what the big boys do and just hard launch when a product is ready. ;)
  
  But yes, I know you must be getting lonely in that cube farm in Sunnyvale/Austin/Toronto as you see more and more of your buddies leaving for greener pastures. ;)