50 replies to this topic

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Catamount, on 03 June 2016 - 10:35 AM, said:

Well if that's the standard of argument we're accepting, then you're as neutral as 13th gear (as in, we have to go to tractor trailer transmissions to show how not-neutral you are), because, like, I say so!









In other words, if you take the games you like, throw out the games you don't like, and claim it's a representative average then... you know what? I'm not even sure where this line of reasoning is going, so you'll have to explain to me how that one works. I'm afraid here on "wrong world" we didn't learn that one in college statistics.

Where I'm from, if the mean advantage, across a large sample of games that aren't hand-picked, doesn't strongly land in favor of the 970, then the 970 isn't outperforming the 290x - it's just outperforming it in certain games, and likewise being beaten in others, which is no net advantage, but hey, I get it, "net" and "mean" refer to something entirely different in Nvidia world than a science or math classroom. Some day someone will have to sit down and explain that one to me.



AMD's market share had a single bad year, 2014. Thus far, you've been unable to offer a single reason when their GPUs in this year were better, sans marketing.




I'm sure, somewhere in here, there is a point that has something to do with the claim of AMD uniquely over-hyping their GPUs, but I haven't dug far enough to find it and I'm starting to hit granite.






No, just you.

Dude the standard of argument was blown away by your admission in several threads to be an AMD fan boy, and you demonstrated this across your posting history, there is zero way you can claim to be neutral .

You would like citation on what? How poor crossfire and SLI have both been for how long now?
Or the fact you'll need to 480's as you would 970's for VR to actually be acceptable?
Or you want a citation on how AMD's internal slides have been inaccurate in the past?

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[color=#959595]In other words, if you take the games you like, throw out the games you don't like[/color]

No, it's taking a sample of games in a benchmark suite, alot of which are repeated in many other suites because they stress cards, crysis and metro for certain, some appear in the same article you linked. I didn't realize linking other benchmarks was a downside these days.....well only if it doesn't fit your point i guess.
People don't sit there and look for mean averages across games they have no interest in playing, they look for games they play or games that play on the same engines to see how their card performs.

If my game were Battlefield, how the card performs in Batman means nothing to me.

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[color=#959595]AMD's market share had a single bad year, 2014. Thus far, you've been unable to offer a single reason when their GPUs in this year were better, sans marketing.[/color]

Why they were better? Maxwell was universally praised or are you just ignoring that? Not only for it's leading performance, but its power consumption while doing that. something the 300 series couldn't match.

If AMD cards had been that good, more would have sold in the discrete market where the builders like us would buy them, at the 20% mark of market share, i would suggest they are barely competing.

The 480 is a good card at a good price, it's only being talked about because of it's price, because we have had 970 performance for how long now..and with this low priced card the second hand market on 300 series and 970/980 cards will tank...which is a good thing for anyone buying and not selling that is.

Edited by Oderint dum Metuant, 03 June 2016 - 11:51 AM.

[Catamount]

Oderint dum Metuant, on 03 June 2016 - 11:41 AM, said:

Dude the standard of argument was blown away by your admission in several threads to be an AMD fan boy, and you demonstrated this across your posting history, there is zero way you can claim to be neutral .

My affinity for the company has nothing to do with the ability to evaluate or present facts. I could hate, AMD, for instance, and it wouldn't make your assertion about market share any more correct.

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You would like citation on what?

You made separate unsupported assertions about Nvidia slide accuracy, ubiquity of SLI/Crossfire support, and behavioral trends. The onus is on you to support each of these. Even your statement about VR requirements, while it has been let slide, has been entirely unsupported here, as far as I can see, so... a citation for everything?

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No, it's taking a sample of games in a benchmark suite, alot of which are repeated in many other suites because they stress cards, crysis and metro for certain, some appear in the same article you linked. I didn't realize linking other benchmarks was a downside these days.....well only if it doesn't fit your point i guess.
People don't sit there and look for mean averages across games they have no interest in playing, they look for games they play or games that play on the same engines to see how their card performs.

If my game were Battlefield, how the card performs in Batman means nothing to me.

In other words, the 970 is amazing if you cherry pick hard enough. That's what I said, is it not?

A card with mediocre average performance across a large random sample of games but really good performance in a select subset of games isn't an amazing card; it's a mediocre card that fits particular small niches well, and by that standard just about every card is a good card, or are we now saying amazing? Fantastic? Stellar?

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Why they were better? Maxwell was universally praised or are you just ignoring that?

So your assertion rests on argumentum ad populum?

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Not only for it's leading performance

that you haven't been able to cite the presence of in any broad sense

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but its power consumption while doing that

The one thing it did right, well, sort of if you ignore the wild peaks and dips?

The thing I notice about power consumption is that when it's in favor of a fanboy's favorite card, it matters, and when it isn't, it doesn't. Some day we're going to have to come to some kind of decision on that.

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If AMD cards had been that good, more would have sold in the discrete market where the builders like us would buy them, at the 20% mark of market share, i would suggest they are barely competing.

I could literally write a book out of the number of premises you're assuming here.

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The 480 is a good card at a good price, it's only being talked about because of it's price, because we have had 970 performance for how long now

You mean 290x performance?

I mean, we could also say GTX Titan performance, but when did the 970 suddenly own a level of performance it delivered a day late and then some, to a market that already had equally-cheap cards giving the same thing?

Edited by Catamount, 03 June 2016 - 12:19 PM.

[Flapdrol]

I think maxwell is superior to gcn, but overpriced.

A 980 only has a 10% bigger chip than a 380x, same memory bus, less powerconsumption. Yet nvidia charges vastly more for it. Given how much a 970 is cut you'd expect the 380x to be faster than a 970 looking at die size and powerconsumption.

Part of the reason is most gcn chips still have some dp compute capability. It looks like polaris will be a gaming focussed chip, so better performance for the production cost.

Pascal has silly high clocks though, that's a lot of performance you don't need much extra die size / transistors for. I guess we'll see it the 29th.

Edited by Flapdrol, 04 June 2016 - 01:10 AM.

[Catamount]

It's hard to separate out how these cards precisely compare to each other.

At the high end GCN was all but absent. Maxwell just dominated. At lower pricepoints it's been a trading battle. The 390, for instance, is pretty unambiguously superior to the 970, slightly at 1080p, considerably at 1440p and above. It's also slightly more expensive, but then has MIRs that take it right back down to the same price. Feature-wise, the fact that it has 8GB of VRAM makes it really compelling, though, because I have games, right now, that blow past 4GB even at 1080P (Ark easily gobbles up my 980TI's 6GB!). Obviously if you only play games that favor the 970, and know for a fact that you'll never play other games, then Maxwell might niche-satisfy the argument you saw above, but otherwise I think AMD, on balance, is offering the more compelling and future-proof product there unless you're super-concerned about power consumption, and in fairness, not everyone pays 7 or 8 cents per kwh..

At lower pricepoints these companies trade various blows with these architectures.

Edited by Catamount, 04 June 2016 - 12:45 PM.

[Thorqemada]

The 480 has no doubt a fantastic value!

Though i will wait until the new AMD CPU comes out and by that time we probably have another GPU Generation that is even better at Value and Performance to build another PC that runs at least 5 to 7 years with only minor upgrades.

Edited by Thorqemada, 08 June 2016 - 01:43 PM.

[Rear Admiral Tier 6]

i hope that AMD drivers will allow 3 or 4-way crossfire on these cards,and the focus would be switched to fine tuning the drivers,since they usually have been the weak link for AMD:s multi-gpu adventures
vulkan and dx12 might be a godsend for stacking these midtier-cards in multi-gpu configs

3 cards price-wise would actually be worth the hassle to be honest

[Catamount]

I'd be worried about 3-card scaling. Trifire/Tri-SLI (god AMD's naming is so much cooler... ) was certainly something we used to do to get rid of microstutter, but AMD and Nvidia have come far enough in alleviating that problem anyways that it's basically a non-issue. I think keeping it to two and buying higher-end if you need more is probably the way to do it, and AMD will be releasing higher-end cards soon enough.

[Rear Admiral Tier 6]

Catamount, on 19 June 2016 - 05:43 AM, said:

I'd be worried about 3-card scaling. Trifire/Tri-SLI (god AMD's naming is so much cooler... ) was certainly something we used to do to get rid of microstutter, but AMD and Nvidia have come far enough in alleviating that problem anyways that it's basically a non-issue. I think keeping it to two and buying higher-end if you need more is probably the way to do it, and AMD will be releasing higher-end cards soon enough.

crossfire scales waaay better in 3- and 4- card configs,if you just get it working properly

[Catamount]

It is interesting to see AMD and Nvidia so neck-and-neck, but look at the numbers. Two cards are justifiable, that's twice the price for ~170% of the performance. It's not a perfect doubling, but you're getting 85% of your value. If the card is an extraordinarily good value or two run faster than any single-GPU solution, either is a very understandable motivation for purchase. Three cards, however, only deliver ~220% for triple the price, dropping the value proposition as you're only able to utilize perhaps 70-75% of your card setup.

By these numbers, two cards actually give you about 85% of what you purchase, while three cards give about 85% of the gain of two cards. When you're comparing that to a single fast card, that means that card could be 37% more expensive for its performance, and break even on value vs the Trifire/TriSLI setup, only without the inconsistency of performance or power draw.

Quadfire/QuadSLI is basically useless. You're not even getting 2/3 of the performance you purchased, on average. At that point, why not get a card that's something like 25% faster, even at a slightly inferior value, and just run two? You'd get the full Quadfire advantage, probably at better value, and certainly with vastly less inconsistent scaling (look at how badly some of those games do!).

Also keep in mind that a board that does dual-GPU is probably going to be cheaper than one that does 3 or 4, let alone 3 or 4 well, so even without figuring the possible need to spend more on a PSU, that alone changes the value equation even further.

TLDR from where I sit:
Crossfire/SLI: Yay, situationally.

Trifire/TriSLI: Meh, at best.

Quadfire/QuadSLI:

Edited by Catamount, 19 June 2016 - 01:10 PM.

[Gwennifer]

Triple-SLI is no longer supported, I think.

[Flapdrol]

Guess I'll bump this, since the card launched.

Performs well for the price, uses a bit more power than expected though.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

From the reviews I've seen thus far it sits between the 970/980 in various games, the stock cooler has been critiqued so I think we will see more performance jumps to solidify it's position at the 980 level.

I still don't see the card as a viable purchase if your already at the 970/390 level (380+ would be questionable) but below that it's a good buy.

There's a decent gap between 480 and 1070 both in price and performance, it will be interesting to see where the 1060 will sit.

Edited by Oderint dum Metuant, 29 June 2016 - 11:20 PM.

[Flapdrol]

If the 1060 is half a 1080 it'll be similar to the 480 on average. Probably with a much lower powerconsumption.

Hope it's a bit faster though, otherwise we'll get the same as with 960 and 970, with the latter being 60% faster and nothing in between.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Flapdrol, on 30 June 2016 - 12:33 AM, said:

If the 1060 is half a 1080 it'll be similar to the 480 on average. Probably with a much lower powerconsumption.

Hope it's a bit faster though, otherwise we'll get the same as with 960 and 970, with the latter being 60% faster and nothing in between.

Which is a mirror of my thoughts I'm hoping for something closer to the 1070

[xWiredx]

While the 480 has been shown to be a fine card now, it is slightly slower than I had hoped. Further, it seems like reference cards have a problem obeying spec in regards to how much power it is drawing through the PCI-E slot. I am really hoping ASUS can right the wrongs here with its Strix variant. If not, I will be looking even closer at the GTX 1060 for my GF's new system.

[Kidler]

I want buy 4GB variant when prices stabilize in shops. If someone already owned this card please share your fps in MWO. I want to know what to expect.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

xWiredx, on 30 June 2016 - 05:25 AM, said:

While the 480 has been shown to be a fine card now, it is slightly slower than I had hoped. Further, it seems like reference cards have a problem obeying spec in regards to how much power it is drawing through the PCI-E slot. I am really hoping ASUS can right the wrongs here with its Strix variant. If not, I will be looking even closer at the GTX 1060 for my GF's new system.

Heres hoping it sees some gains via drivers over time.

[Peter2k]

xWiredx, on 30 June 2016 - 05:25 AM, said:

While the 480 has been shown to be a fine card now, it is slightly slower than I had hoped. Further, it seems like reference cards have a problem obeying spec in regards to how much power it is drawing through the PCI-E slot. I am really hoping ASUS can right the wrongs here with its Strix variant. If not, I will be looking even closer at the GTX 1060 for my GF's new system.

The Strix has 2 6 pin connectors
Edit; says 2 pcie powers connectors, so I kind of assumed they'd be 6 pin
So that should work out better
Same cooler as on the 1070/1080 strix as it seems
With aura as well

sigh
Still 1070 is titan x performance
Hmm

Edited by Peter2k, 30 June 2016 - 07:13 AM.

[Peter2k]

STR8-Eight, on 30 June 2016 - 07:20 AM, said:

stuff :-)

I get it
But the strix is going to fit to my Formula VIII, same design and aura system

But that step up offer is nice

I've build so many systems over the year's
Both AMD and Intel
Intel systems always booted up without a hitch
AMD's I always had to fiddle and find out why it wouldn't even post something

Since I have a steady income I never regretted going the Intel/Nvidia route, ever, even once
Hell I sold my ivy bridge and z97 for more than I thought I would get just so I can get a skylake and the newer stuff (M2 ssd for instance, can pop in a kaby lake next year)
And everything went smooth building the whole thing

It's that kind of stuff AMD has to cure and convince me first to ever become a customer again
It's like 15 years of bad experiences

Edited by Peter2k, 30 June 2016 - 07:33 AM.

[GetinmyBellah]

LOL I went wayyy off topic and just rambled away. Thank you for the laugh, Peter - stuff, indeed! Haha <o happy hunting!

Edit:
oh yeah, and for some reason my edits were not holding - so, yeah... anyhow, I agree with you wholeheartedly!

Edited by STR8-Eight, 30 June 2016 - 07:38 AM.