AMD Radeon R9 200 series

[Jorge-Vieira]

Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X 8GB and 4GB review: is 8GB useful?

Intro

AMD recently announced its hardware partners could start offering their own versions of the Radeon R9 290X with 8GB memory. Sapphire was the first (and as of yet the only) to be able to offer us a 290X with 8GB memory, namely the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X. We put the graphics card to the test and compared it to the 4GB edition to find out whether the added 4GB has a sizeable impact or not.

If you’re not quite familiar with the Radeon R9 290X you can read all about it in our initial review. The popularity of the R9 290X has decreased somewhat with the recent introduction of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. Our tests have revealed that the cards are not only well matched in terms of specs, but they are also priced competitively. The decision between Nvidia and AMD will depend mostly on specific things; AMD flaunts their FreeSync support, the Mantle API and True Audio while Nvidia banks on support for G-Sync and lower power consumption.

Toda a review:
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/5913...-is-8gb-useful

[Jorge-Vieira]

AMD Hiring CPU Engineer For GPU Driver Optimization

AMD is hiring a CPU Performance Engineer to optimize the graphics drivers in CPU intensive gaming scenarios. This was revealed via a job description listed by AMD on LinkedIn yesterday. We’ve seen similar job openings at AMD in recent times. It seems the company is pouring more resources into driver development and optimization.
This renewed focus in improving the overall user experience has begun about a couple of years ago. We’ve seen AMD significantly increase its software investments in comparison to the company’s historical trend. Things like HSA, Mantle, the Omega drivers and the AMD Gaming Evolved app are all a result of this.
AMD Hiring CPU Performance Engineer For GPU Driver Optimization

We’ve been following the progress that AMD has achieved on the software front in the past little while. Only a couple of months ago we talked about how the company’s professional FirePro drivers have been rock solid for the past two years.
We’ve also covered the successful launch of the Catalyst Omega drivers. Which brought to the market the most comprehensive performance improvement and bug squashing effort we’ve seen from the company in a very long time.


Evidently the company does not wish to stop there, and without a doubt there’s always going to be room for improvement. So let’s take a look at the recent job opening in the company.

Job description

Preferred Location: Boxborough, MA or Sunnyvale, CA
Will also consider: Markham, Canada or Austin, TXWe are looking for a CPU performance engineer working with highly talented 3D graphics driver developers to optimize graphics drivers. The responsibilities include analyzing CPU bound benchmarks and games to identify a variety of CPU bottlenecks in drivers, optimizing the drivers, and providing optimization actions to ISVs. The candidate will analyze new CPU architecture impact on driver performance and translate into actionable tasks. This position requires the candidate to collaborate with graphics and CPU architects at multi-sites across multiple graphics driver components.
Qualifications and skills
•Must hold a B.S or higher degree in Computer Science/Engineering
•Strong programming skills in C and C++ with in depth knowledge of assembly code
•Have 5+ years of CPU performance tuning and optimization experience
•Familiar with multiprocessing and multi-thread programing
•Understand CPU and computer system architecture
•Experience on AMD CPUs, 3D graphic driver development, Windows OS memory management, CPU ASIC design/debug, and performance tools like CodeXL is a big plus
•Ability to communicate, cooperate, and thrive in a team environment

It’s clear from the job description above that AMD is looking to significantly improve CPU performance in games. Not only through multi-threaded driver optimizations but also by working directly with ISVs (Independent software vendors) i.e game developers to develop and implement performance optimizations. It’s important to note that this is established common practice for hardware companies. AMD, Intel and Nvidia have all been doing this for years.
However what’s perhaps interesting in this particular instance is that even with the financial pressures that AMD has been going through recently, the company is still increasing software development R&D spending. And that’s certainly a welcomed sight especially when it comes to the hyper-competitive graphics space. We’ll be following this as it develops and we hope to be able to measure this progress once AMD launches its next generation Radeon 300 series graphics cards.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/amd-hiring-cpu-e...#ixzz3SU2mvCMB

[Winjer]

Ainda bem que a AMD está a apostar forte das drivers.

O caminho certo é menos bitatites e mais inovação.

[Jorge-Vieira]

E nem desculpa têm, dado que estão com a mesma arquitetura há anos, só têm mais que optimizar os drivers em condições e aproximarem-se ainda mais da concorrencia nesse aspecto.

Bitaites, eles até os podiam mandar, desde que fossem em condições

[Jorge-Vieira]

Review: PowerColor Radeon R9 290 PCS+

Introduction

A deluge of Nvidia GPU releases have been stealing the limelight of late. New high-end cards such as the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 have cemented the green team's position as provider of modern, energy-efficient hardware, while the GeForce GTX 960 bestrides the mainstream market
But it's not all good news for Nvidia, as the GTX 970 has come under closer scrutiny for not being quite what it was initially made out to be. The lesser GTX 960 meanwhile arrives to retail at around £160 in overclocked form for a GPU that isn't significantly faster than the previous-generation model.
AMD and its partners spy an opportunity between these two Nvidia Maxwell-based graphic cards, and they are renewing the price-to-performance battle with the Radeon R9 290 in particular. A case in point is PowerColor, who is offering its custom-designed, overclocked PCS+ version at just over £200, thereby hitting the sweetspot existing between the two Nvidia cards.

It was only a year ago that the R9 290X version of this card cost a wallet-busting £500. Father Time has been kind to the consumer who can now enjoy 85 per cent of that card's performance for a 40 per cent outlay.
PowerColor doesn't mess around with the PCS+ line, knowing that taming the heat produced by the underlying Hawaii-based silicon is no easy task. Enter the 2.5-slot cooler that spans the entire 290mm of the card's length. Want some heavy-duty action? How about five thick heatpipes, two sets of aluminium cooling arrays and a trio of 80mm fans. Such focus on cooling is said to reduce temperatures and noise levels by 24 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively, when compared with the toasty and loud reference card.
And substantial cooling isn't merely designed to whet the enthusiasts' appetites. Enabling lower-than-reference temperatures should ensure the card is able to stay close to its maximum frequencies at all times, something that R9-series reference GPUs have struggled with.

PowerColor scoffs at the 'up to 947MHz' core speed of said reference card and duly clocks the PCS+ in at 1,040MHz - a 10 per cent increase that, due to the cooler temperatures, is likely to be worth a touch more in real-word gaming. It's good to see the 4GB SK hynix memory isn't considered the poor cousin; PCS+ increases this from 5,000MHz to 5,400MHz. The long and short of it is that this card will be substantially faster than reference.
Power is fed through the usual 8-6-pin PCIe arrangement down one side. Keeping an eye on other hot-running components, thermal tape sits between the memory chips and cooler while two small heatsinks take care of the VRM circuitry. Interestingly, PowerColor adds some glue to the VRMs in an effort to mitigate the dreaded coil whine.

A metal backplate contrasts with the plastic shroud on the top. We'd normally argue that it's not strictly needed as the components are all housed on the topside, but it does become rather warm - to the tune of 65°C - when the card is placed under sustained load. Looking very closely at the top edge reveals a tiny BIOS-flicking switch that regulates the fan-speed profile, but not the frequencies, for this model. By default the card is in what we'd call the louder state - more on this later.

There isn't much call for a card-wide exhaust vent on an open-air cooling design such as the PCS+; PowerColor recognises this fact by sticking to AMD's default quartet of two dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI, all of which can be used concurrently to drive four high-resolution panels.
The kicker here is the price, or lack thereof. An overclocked R9 290 priced at £210 or so is further sweetened by AMD's Never Settle Gold Space Edition where purchasers can redeem up to three games from authorised retailers.

Toda a review:
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...on-r9-290-pcs/

[Jorge-Vieira]

Sapphire Rolls Out Radeon R7 260X iCafe OC Graphics Card

Sapphire rolled out the entry-mid range Radeon R7 260X iCafe OC graphics card for casual-gaming PC builds (eg: low-cost Counter Strike gaming kiosks). Pictured below, the card looks rather premium, with its full-length, dual-slot cooler. That is, until you take a peek under its plastic shroud to find a cost-effective fan-heatsink cooling the GPU, with radially-projecting aluminium fins, a copper core base, and an 80 mm fan ventilating it.

The card draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector; outputs include one each of dual-link DVI, HDMI 1.4a, and DisplayPort 1.2a. The card offers a factory-overclock of 1050 MHz core, and an untouched 5.00 GHz memory, against reference clocks of 1000 MHz on the core. Based on the 28 nm "Bonaire" silicon, the R7 260X offers 896 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory on this card. Expect a $100-ish pricing.

Noticia:
http://www.techpowerup.com/210306/sa...hics-card.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

AMD Cuts Prices on Radeon R9 285 Graphics Cards – Now Selling For $200 US, Directly Competes Against GTX 960

AMD has given a new series of price cuts on their Tonga GPU based Radeon R9 285 graphics cards which was also the last R200 series graphics card to launch last year, reports Hardware.fr. The Radeon R9 285 graphics card launched at a price of $249 US and was positioned in a market which already has two good cards, the Radeon R9 280 and the R9 280X which featured better specifications than the Radeon R9 285 graphics cards however, the efficient Tonga core now comes into action as it is directly competing against the GTX 960 graphics card from NVIDIA.

AMD Radeon R9 285 Graphics Card Price Slashed To $200 US

The AMD Radeon R9 285 graphics card launched back in August 2014 for a price of $249 US. Based on the Tonga core architecture, the Radeon R9 285 was thought to feature higher performance and an efficient design that would rival NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs however it wasn’t as efficient but had some features which leveraged performance in the form of conservative use of bandwidth through color compression technology, an updated instruction set, improved geometry processing and slightly lower power consumption than Tahiti chips. A few other things included full support for TrueAudio, Freesync and DirectX 12 API which are going to be an essential use in the upcoming months when new AAA titles launch.

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The main specifications of the card included 28 compute units which features 1792 stream processors, 112 texture mapping units and 32 raster operation units. At one point, these specification seemed similar to the Radeon R9 280 and the card was indeed just about similar in performance to the R9 280 and stood below the R9 280X in pure performance numbers. The card included a 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM along a 256-bit bus compared to a 3 GB GDDR5 and 384-bit bus which the Tahiti cards featured at the same time. This meant that the card was slightly expensive then cards which were already available prior to launch. The price cuts come a bit late since NVIDIA has already caught the market share with their $200 US GeForce GTX 960 and the Radeon R9 280 is selling for under $190 US.
However, AMD users now can lean towards the Radeon R9 285 instead of the GTX 960 and R9 280 since it offers more performance. The new architecture design will undoubtedly help the Tonga core to be further optimized and utilized with next generation AAA titles and compared to the GTX 960, it features a better memory bus which results in better texture processing and further features a robust geometry processing engine. We won’t see the full Tonga chip launch in the 200 series from AMD but we can expect another round of Tonga cards in the upcoming Radeon R300 series family which is expected to launch in the next few months. As for the pricing, it has been stated that the Radeon R9 285 is now retainling for $200 US officially.


AMD Radeon R9 285 Specifications:

	AMD Radeon R7 260X	AMD Radeon R9 270	AMD Radeon R9 270X	AMD Radeon R9 280	AMD Radeon R9 285	AMD Radeon R9 280X	AMD Radeon R9 290	AMD Radeon R9 290X	AMD Radeon R9 295X2
GPU Core	Neptune XT	Curacao Pro	Curacao XT	Tahiti Pro	Tonga Pro	Tahiti XT	Hawaii Pro	Hawaii XT	Vesuvius
GPU Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU Cores	896	1280	1280	1792	1792	2048	2560	2816	5632
Core Clock	1100 MHz	900 MHz	975 MHz	933 MHz	918 MHz	1000 MHz	947 MHz	1000 MHz	1018 MHz
VRAM	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	8 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1625 MHz	1400 MHz	1400 MHz	1250 MHz	1375 MHz	1500 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz
Memory Bus	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit	512-bit	512-bit	512-bitx2
Memory Bandwidth	104.0 GB/s	179.2 GB/s	179.2 GB/s	224.4 GB/s	176.2 GB/s	288.0 GB/s	320 GB/s	320 GB/s	320 GB/s x 2
TMUs / ROPs	56 / 16	80 / 32	80 / 32	116 / 32	112 / 32	128 / 32	160 / 64	176 / 64	176 / 64 x 2
Launch Price	$129	$179	$199	$229	$249	$289	$399	$549	$1499
New Prices	$114	$159	$179	$179	$199	$229	$269	$299	$649

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/amd-cuts-prices-...#ixzz3YuJzl3qb


Penso que este corte já vem muito tarde... a não ser que isto seja para escoar stocks paras as "novas" AMD

[jotinha17]

Já veio um pouco tarde isto, contudo é sempre bom, mas duvido que vá abanar com o mercado das 960... tenho-as visto a sair que nem pães quentes e as 970 igual

[MTPS]

Mas que inteligência...demoram meio ano a perceber o lógico.

[Jorge-Vieira]

E em meio ano afundaram-se a pique nas tabelas de vendas de graficas, este abaixamento em nada vai mudar a situação, isto devia ter sido feito logo nos dias a seguir à nVidia ter colocado cá fora a GTX 970.

[LPC]

E em meio ano afundaram-se a pique nas tabelas de vendas de graficas, este abaixamento em nada vai mudar a situação, isto devia ter sido feito logo nos dias a seguir à nVidia ter colocado cá fora a GTX 970.

Boas!
Exacto...

Demoraram tanto tempo a responder que é irrelevante actualmente...

Cumprimentos,

LPC

[Jorge-Vieira]

Sapphire R9 285 ITX OC: Sapphire Tackles the ITX Scene

Big Things, Small Packages

Sapphire isn’t a brand we have covered in a while, so it is nice to see a new and interesting product drop on our door. Sapphire was a relative unknown until around the release of the Radeon 9700 Pro days. This was around the time when ATI decided that they did not want to be so vertically integrated, so allowed other companies to start buying their chips and making their own cards. This was done to provide a bit of stability for ATI pricing, as they didn’t have to worry about a volatile component market that could cause their margins to plummet. By selling just the chips to partners, ATI could more adequately control margins on their own product while allowing their partners to make their own deals and component choices for the finished card.

ATI had very limited graphics card production of their own, so they often would farm out production to second sources. One of these sources ended up turning into Sapphire. When ATI finally allowed other partners to produce and brand their own ATI based products, Sapphire already had a leg up on the competition by being a large producer already of ATI products. They soon controlled a good portion of the marketplace by their contacts, pricing, and close relationship with ATI.
Since this time ATI has been bought up by AMD and they no longer produce any ATI branded cards. Going vertical when it come to producing their own chips and video cards was obviously a bad idea, we can look back at 3dfx and their attempt at vertical integration and how that ended for the company. AMD obviously produces an initial reference version of their cards and coolers, but allows their partners to sell the “sticker” version and then develop their own designs. This has worked very well for both NVIDIA and AMD, and it has allowed their partners to further differentiate their product from the competition.

Sapphire usually does a bang up job on packaging the graphics card. Oh look, a mousepad!
Sapphire is not as big of a player as they used to be, but they are still one of the primary partners of AMD. It would not surprise me in the least if they still produced the reference designs for AMD and then distributed those products to other partners. Sapphire is known for building a very good quality card and their cooling solutions have been well received as well. The company does have some stiff competition from the likes of Asus, MSI, and others for this particular market. Unlike those two particular companies, Sapphire obviously does not make any NVIDIA based boards. This has been a blessing and a curse, depending on what the cycle is looking like between AMD and NVIDIA and who has dominance in any particular marketplace.
Click here to read the entire Sapphire R9 285 ITX OC Review!
Sapphire was kind enough to send me a sample of their R9 285 ITX graphics card. This little number promises some good performance considering its size. We just have to see how good it performs, as well as what the acoustics and cooling are for a card this small.

The R9 285 ITX OC Edition
The R9 285 has had a troubled life, which is unfortunate because it is really a neat chip. It was released only a week before NVIDIA unveiled their GTX 900 series of cards and the R9 was quickly overshadowed. Add into the equation that the new aspects of the GCN 1.2 architecture were not pushed as hard as they could have been. While it was more efficient than previous GCN generations, it still had a pretty big transistor count. Besides efficiency improvements it offered TrueAudio, xDMA CrossFire, and a new memory compression scheme to allowed it to adequately leverage the 256 bit GDDR-5 interface running at a relatively slow 5500 MHz effective. Performance is around the R9 280 level in most situations, with higher performance in others. AMD increased tessellation performance by a factor of two over the previous R9 280 and 280X, and it matches the newer Hawaii based R9 290X in overall tessellation.

The bundle is positively extensive as compared to competing products! Have I mentioned the free mousepad yet?
In stock form the R9 285 based on Tonga is a 1792 shader part. The 28 compute cores are divided into 4 shader engines. Each shader engine has its own geometry/tessellation processor so it can do 4 primitives per clock as compared to the older R9 280X which could only do 2. The 256 bit memory bus is clocked in at around 5500 Mhz which gives around 176 GB/sec of throughput. It also features 8 Asynchronous Compute Engines (up from 2 in 280X) which could make a pretty good impact in Mantle, DirectX 12, and Vulkan applications. This is a cut down version of this chip as Tonga supposedly has another compute core per shader engine for a total of 2048 stream units.
Sapphire has taken the chip and created the R9 285 ITX. This is a small form factor video card that still is expected to have good cooling and performance characteristics. Previous ITX iterations that I have reviewed from Asus and MSI have had some issues with keeping things quiet while under load. The design that Sapphire implemented looks to have alleviated that problem. The heatsink has a large aluminum base that covers the memory and power components. The GPU is covered by two larger and two smaller heatpipes. A total of four heatpipes in such a design is pretty rare. The aluminum fins that the heatpipes are attached to are plentiful and closely spaced. A large vent on the back of the card helps to exhaust some of that hot air out of the case.

Toda a review:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphic...kles-ITX-Scene

[LPC]

Boas!

Who cares... Too little too late...

Cumprimentos,

LPC

[Jorge-Vieira]

Prepare for VR with this $250 XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X

If you're planning on jumping on the VR bandwagon and just need to upgrade your video card, then we've found a good deal for you.

We've seen some pretty stellar deals from Tiger Direct over the last few weeks, including a VisionTek AMD R9 Nano for just $400. The latest sale sees a pretty beefy discount on a tremendous VR-capable video card: an XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X for just $251.99.

The deal shaves a clean $128 off of the card's retail price tag, and arms you with a substantial graphical contender that will carry you through this generation of virtual reality tech. The XFX Radeon R9 290X Black Edition's specifications include 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a core clock speed of 1050MHz with a memory clock speed of 5,000MHz, double dissipation Ghost2 Thermal cooling, 2,816 stream processors, and is packed on a 512-bit bus.

This particular card also comes packed with the benefits of AMD's R9 200 series, including support for FreeSync, DirectX 12, 4K resolution, and AMD EyeFinity. If you pick up the care, be sure to check and make sure your power supply is compatible, as the XFX Radeon R9 290X requires 1 x 6-pin + 1 x 8-pin connectors.

Remember that the Oculus Rift requires at least an AMD Radeon R9 290+ (or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970) to power the high-performance and low-latency magic of virtual reality. The Facebook-owned VR pioneers recently revealed the Oculus Rift's $599 price tag at CES 2016, so picking up a Rift and this card will set you back a cool $851 or so. That's not too bad considering vendors like Alienware are shipping $1,200 VR Ready PCs with only a GTX 970.

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/49535/...90x/index.html


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