RX 480 just hit USA stores, initial supply 20x bigger than one from 1080

[Jahramika]

8 hours ago, DXMember said:

makes sense as it's 20x cheaper

Really why do you say that? Nvidia has billions more whats so hard about making a chip

[Ryoutarou97]

11 minutes ago, Jahramika said:

Really why do you say that? Nvidia has billions more whats so hard about making a chip

If they had even a million more prices wouldn't be as high as they are now. The problem is that the 1080 and 1070 are much larger chips than the 480 and production couldn't quite keep up with demand whereas the 480 has much larger supply (not launched too early?) and is much faster to make because there are less failed chips.

[mariushm]

26 minutes ago, Jahramika said:

Really why do you say that? Nvidia has billions more whats so hard about making a chip

 

 

11 minutes ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

If they had even a million more prices wouldn't be as high as they are now. The problem is that the 1080 and 1070 are much larger chips than the 480 and production couldn't quite keep up with demand whereas the 480 has much larger supply (not launched too early?) and is much faster to make because there are less failed chips.

 

It's actually more complicated than that.

 

GPU chips are manufactured on big 20-30cm round wafers, each such wafer holding a few hundred chips. Once the wafer comes out, they cut the small squares and rectangles from the wafer and take them to another location to test them and make them in the final chip shape you see on video cards.

 

When a new manufacturing process is used ( TSMC 16nm for nVidia, 14nm Global Foundries or Samsung for AMD), the manufacturing process is not so fine tuned, not tweaked enough, to produce very high quality wafers. So basically, spread all over the surface of that 20-30 cm wafer/disc of silicon super tiny manufacturing errors show up (one transistor not working there, one memory cell not writable and so on). These flaws are  either concentrated in specific locations on the wafer disc, or spaced apart all over the wafer.

 

AMD or nVidia cut the chip rectangles or squares from the discs, test them for errors and probably only 10-30% of the chips are completely error free. For the large majority of the other chips, there's only a few errors in specific parts of the chips which can be disabled after manufacturing so that you make a functional chip out of it. A part of the chips can not be repaired at all so they're thrown away.

Engineers in the business say that TSMC's 16nm process has a higher rate of manufacturing flaws, meaning that if you take a 30cm disc from Global Foundries and compare it with a 30cm disc from TSMC, the one made by TSMC has more errors, more chips can never be recovered.

nVidia's chips are also much larger in surface area (at around 310-330mm squared) compared to AMD's chips (230mm squared for Polaris 10 or about 100mm squared for Polaris 11), which means there's a potential for more errors to show up on a single chip, which means to recover that chip, nVidia may have to disable more sections of the chip to recover it, to make it functional.

You could say GTX1080 is 90% of what the chip was meant to be (with 10% of it disabled due to errors in manufacturing) and GTX 1070 is maybe 75% of what the chip was meant to be, the GTX1070 are chips with even more errors in them compared to GTX1080.

 

It's said that nVidia probably ordered a bunch of  wafers made as a sort of trial, hoping to get maybe 10-20k chips in total, and they got a few thousand chips good enough to be called GTX1080 and maybe 10k chips that could be called GTX1070 but a few thousand chips were so bad they couldn't be recovered and ended up in the trash, so that's why the chips and the cards are so expensive, they have to recover the costs of the wafers.

With this first batch of chips, the idea is to fine tune the manufacturing process to reduce the number of defects showing up on wafers, or in extreme cases to tweak the design of a chip in a few places that are more sensitive to defects (add more redundancy in the chip, more stuff that could be disabled if faulty, make some transistors bigger or stronger and so on)

 

AMD however decided not to risk it and made the chips much smaller, smaller chips means higher chance some chips won't have ANY errors in them, so it's said that Polaris 10 (the RX480) is probably 95% of what the chip was intended to be, and RX470 is probably about 85% of what the chip was meant to be.

AMD gets more functional chips out of each wafer, and a higher percentage of these chips can be sold as RX480, making the whole deal more profitable for them, so they can afford to sell the cards at lower price.

They can also keep the factory happy mass producing chips like the Polaris 11 ones (RX460) because they have orders from OEM manufacturers ready and willing to include them in "back to school" desktops and laptops while nVidia right now has nothing new that's VALUE or low power consumption.

 

[Briggsy]

36 minutes ago, mariushm said:

 

 

 

It's actually more complicated than that.

 

GPU chips are manufactured on big 20-30cm round wafers, each such wafer holding a few hundred chips. Once the wafer comes out, they cut the small squares and rectangles from the wafer and take them to another location to test them and make them in the final chip shape you see on video cards.

 

When a new manufacturing process is used ( TSMC 16nm for nVidia, 14nm Global Foundries or Samsung for AMD), the manufacturing process is not so fine tuned, not tweaked enough, to produce very high quality wafers. So basically, spread all over the surface of that 20-30 cm wafer/disc of silicon super tiny manufacturing errors show up (one transistor not working there, one memory cell not writable and so on). These flaws are  either concentrated in specific locations on the wafer disc, or spaced apart all over the wafer.

 

AMD or nVidia cut the chip rectangles or squares from the discs, test them for errors and probably only 10-30% of the chips are completely error free. For the large majority of the other chips, there's only a few errors in specific parts of the chips which can be disabled after manufacturing so that you make a functional chip out of it. A part of the chips can not be repaired at all so they're thrown away.

Engineers in the business say that TSMC's 16nm process has a higher rate of manufacturing flaws, meaning that if you take a 30cm disc from Global Foundries and compare it with a 30cm disc from TSMC, the one made by TSMC has more errors, more chips can never be recovered.

nVidia's chips are also much larger in surface area (at around 310-330mm squared) compared to AMD's chips (230mm squared for Polaris 10 or about 100mm squared for Polaris 11), which means there's a potential for more errors to show up on a single chip, which means to recover that chip, nVidia may have to disable more sections of the chip to recover it, to make it functional.

You could say GTX1080 is 90% of what the chip was meant to be (with 10% of it disabled due to errors in manufacturing) and GTX 1070 is maybe 75% of what the chip was meant to be, the GTX1070 are chips with even more errors in them compared to GTX1080.

 

It's said that nVidia probably ordered a bunch of  wafers made as a sort of trial, hoping to get maybe 10-20k chips in total, and they got a few thousand chips good enough to be called GTX1080 and maybe 10k chips that could be called GTX1070 but a few thousand chips were so bad they couldn't be recovered and ended up in the trash, so that's why the chips and the cards are so expensive, they have to recover the costs of the wafers.

With this first batch of chips, the idea is to fine tune the manufacturing process to reduce the number of defects showing up on wafers, or in extreme cases to tweak the design of a chip in a few places that are more sensitive to defects (add more redundancy in the chip, more stuff that could be disabled if faulty, make some transistors bigger or stronger and so on)

 

AMD however decided not to risk it and made the chips much smaller, smaller chips means higher chance some chips won't have ANY errors in them, so it's said that Polaris 10 (the RX480) is probably 95% of what the chip was intended to be, and RX470 is probably about 85% of what the chip was meant to be.

AMD gets more functional chips out of each wafer, and a higher percentage of these chips can be sold as RX480, making the whole deal more profitable for them, so they can afford to sell the cards at lower price.

They can also keep the factory happy mass producing chips like the Polaris 11 ones (RX460) because they have orders from OEM manufacturers ready and willing to include them in "back to school" desktops and laptops while nVidia right now has nothing new that's VALUE or low power consumption.

 

Well said.

 

As to whether AMD will be able to keep up with demand... 

 

The last time we had a node shrink, AMD and Nvidia both released mid-range size chips, in the 680 and 7970. Of course, they were considered high-end at the time because there was nothing better, but in the scheme of things they were mid-range size. What ended up occurring (if memory serves) is that the 680 had supply issues for months due to the demands, and retailers ended up price gouging with the 7970 because it wasn't moving as fast (despite being the stronger card spec-wise). Of course a lot of people bought the 670 instead, which was a really good deal at the time. 

 

This time around, Nvidia yet again are having supply issues (its an issue for consumers, not so much for Nvidia). Will there be price gouging once the first round of 480's sell out? hard to say. Between OEM's and retailers, someone will get the short end of the stick, and prices will level appropriately for the 480. Yes, we are talking about entry/mid-range cards on the AMD side vs. Mid/High-end range on the Nvidia side, but given that AMD are effectively eliminating all previous cards except the 980ti (because people will buy an 8GB 480 before a Fury/X despite the performance gap), the only graphic cards worth buying once the 29th hits will be the 480, 470, 460, 1070, 1080 and 980ti. Given the price of a new 980ti, its only worth buying used, which doesn't help marketshare or retailers/nvidia.

 

That effectively leaves the 470, 480 as the only graphic cards available (potentially) that are worth buying new for AAA PC gaming. I have strong doubts that supply will be fine for 470/480 either, so what may end up happening is price gouging on AMD cards, despite them not even being in the same performance tier as Nvidia this time, simply because retailers can still keep getting more polaris cards shipped in, but not fast enough to meet demand.

 

Well Played AMD, well played.

 

*edit* I should add: this scenario completely depends on Nvidia not releasing a 1060/ti anytime soon. If Nvidia are waiting in the shadows like a ninja, and preparing to launch a 480 competitor, this would probably be a very large fly in AMD's ointment.

[shdowhunt60]

Yeah, no. AMD definitely did their homework on this, and left nVidia completely flatfoot. They're flooding the market with cheap GPU's that absolutely cream 1080p, and at far greater availability than nVidia can ever hope to keep up with. 

[Morgan MLGman]

I will be the sceptical one and say that the RX 480 will be at R9 390 level of performance. Hoping I'm wrong though. Because all those "Fury level of performance" seem to be a bit over the top for a 199$ GPU. Just too good to be true ^^ Even if the performance is 390-ish, I'll still buy two at the end of summer holidays.

[DXMember]

3 hours ago, Briggsy said:

Do all 980ti's overclock to nearly 1600Mhz? If you already have a 980ti, a 1070 probably looks like a useless upgrade. In my own case it was a question of paying $560CND vs. $900-950CND for basically the same gaming performance, but getting 8GB memory, much better VR support, Better multimonitor support, and async shaders, half the power consumption (my room doesn't turn into an oven), not to mention longer driver support. I would assume on the AMD side its the same for anyone with a 290/390/x, where a 480 is a sidegrade. Next-gen, better software, better support, much better power draw, but you will still see Hawaii owners humming and hawing about hawaii vs. polaris, just like you're doing with 980ti vs 1070.

but the thing is that people are going on a rampage over the forums and legit upgrading from 980ti to 1070 or skipping deals like MSI Twin Frozr 980ti for $369 to get a FE 1070 for $450

2 hours ago, Jahramika said:

Really why do you say that? Nvidia has billions more whats so hard about making a chip

why don't you go and make us some chips?

[Atmos]

8 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Actually closer to 220 =/= 450. The 380 MSRP is mostly on paper only right now, it will be a good while before any vendor puts out any 1070 at MSRP. Nvidia knew this all too well I think the Founders edition was a way to not officially increase the price of the tier but to encourage all card vendors to do so making it pretty much a defacto increase.

youre not wrong really. The 1070 and 1080 just did not have enough enough stock at launch.  New product price premium and nonexistent stock price inflation have only made this series way more expensive than they should be. 

Nvidia kind of shit the bed with their initial stock this time around. 

[kameshss]

11 hours ago, Colt_0pz said:

Let's see if it compares to the 1070

i donno. my guess would be no.

 

it'll be close to 1060 if it comes out later.

[RagnarokDel]

3 hours ago, Jahramika said:

Really why do you say that? Nvidia has billions more whats so hard about making a chip

if you make 200mm² chips on a 40000mm² wafer and 25 of them have defects, 175 chips(200 made) will be intact. If you make 300mm² chips on a 40000mm² wafer and 25 of them have defects, you'll have 108 chips(133 made). I'm explaining it really simply but it's the same concept. Smaller chips means you'll get a better yield % for the same amount of defects.

[Briggsy]

9 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Actually closer to 220 =/= 450. The 380 MSRP is mostly on paper only right now, it will be a good while before any vendor puts out any 1070 at MSRP. Nvidia knew this all too well I think the Founders edition was a way to not officially increase the price of the tier but to encourage all card vendors to do so making it pretty much a defacto increase.

The fugly Gigabyte card just came in (and went back out of) stock here for close to MSRP (converted from CND money of course and including extra shipping costs). I've been watching 1070's closely for the past week and Nvidia are looking like they are swinging into full production mode now, despite the demand not waivering, and 1070's and 1080's are coming into stock far more frequently. Problem is, people who are willing to pay more get first dibs, not much different than going to a 24/7 auction that sells the same item over and over, really. You want to pay MSRP? you gotta wait for everyone that is willing to pay more than you to go away.

 

I'm pretty sure the 8GB 480 will be at MSRP for all of 12 hours, in stores that don't throw a little extra on top right away. People are fooling themselves if they think the 8GB 480 will stay in stock for more than a day, let alone stay at MSRP of $240-250 USD. It's possible I'm completely wrong, but it all depends on how well the card performs in official benchmarks. If its beating a 980 and Fury with mild overclock, good luck finding one on the 30th.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, Atmos said:

youre not wrong really. The 1070 and 1080 just did not have enough enough stock at launch.  New product price premium and nonexistent stock price inflation have only made this series way more expensive than they should be. 

Nvidia kind of shit the bed with their initial stock this time around. 

You know I think you just hit it right on the nail this time: Nvidia wanted to launch ahead of Polaris but knew production just wasn't there on time so it would make sense of technically making the cards available but at a price premium by default to attenuate a bit for the short initial stock and then trust board partners would lower the prices once supply increases and demand decreases.

 

Thing is, I doubt the prices will go down much if it's up to the manufacturers even if the supply and demand dynamics change.

[CTR640]

Hopefully a shitload of people will go for the RX480 instead of the ridicolous high priced GTX1080/1070.

Seriously, fuck Nvidia with their pricing schemes.

[Matu20]

8 hours ago, CTR640 said:

Hopefully a shitload of people will go for the RX480 instead of the ridicolous high priced GTX1080/1070.

Seriously, fuck Nvidia with their pricing schemes.

Nvidia basically has a monopoly right now. The only high end cards with the new node on the market. If AMD fails to deliver or will go bankrupt, this is the future.

 

But ... AMD, at least on paper, has already won the battle this year, with releasing the lower end Polaris architecture before Vega (for yield purposes). They can easily match the demand and flood the market. I wouldn't be suprised if the 480 took over as the most popular GPU on Steam by fall.

 

I am hopeful.

[Camisto]

My microcenter recieved 20x 1080's each shipment and they were all sold out within a single day each time.  I might go ahead and pick me up a 480 as well!

 

Nvidia basically has a monopoly right now. The only high end cards with the new node on the market. If AMD fails to deliver or will go bankrupt, this is the future.

 

But ... AMD, at least on paper, has already won the battle this year, with releasing the lower end Polaris architecture before Vega (for yield purposes). They can easily match the demand and flood the market. I wouldn't be suprised if the 480 took over as the most popular GPU on Steam by fall.

 

I am hopeful.

I think its a 100% guarantee that the 480 will be the most popular GPU in this time period.

[Colt_0pz]

22 hours ago, Nacho Marco Segui said:

~snip~

 

22 hours ago, IMPERIUS said:

~snip~

 

22 hours ago, DXMember said:

~snip~

 

21 hours ago, Atmos said:

~snip~

I have no idea of the performance of the RX 480. Someone tell me how much difference there is.

[Energycore]

Just please have the cards come to the backwater markets quick

[LAwLz]

42 minutes ago, Colt_0pz said:

I have no idea of the performance of the RX 480. Someone tell me how much difference there is.

We don't know yet. The NDA will be lifted the 29th. Leaked benchmarks (which are not very trustworthy) usually puts it between the 390 and 390X.

 

If those numbers are true then the 1070 will be about 35% faster at 4K, and about 50% faster at 1080p (according to Techpowerup's benchmarks). 

[mariushm]

According to someone who received a card for review, AMD announced him that they'll release the recommended "benchmark drivers" /  official Polaris drivers on the 27th ... so whatever benchmarks reviewers already performed have the potential to be incorrect. Who knows, if we're lucky those drivers enable some things in the cards to make them faster...

 

There are pictures with the contents of XFX RX480 BLACK OC 1328M 8 GB edition box and it has a driver CD with version 16.20 RC6 written on the disc so I can only guess the official Polaris drivers are 16.20 or something to that effect.

 

i grabbed some pictures from two Baidu image galleries showing the contents of Sapphire Reference RX480 and XFX RX480 BLACK OC 1328M 8GB and posted them on another forum I use often, Baidu doesn't seem to work now at least for me so I'm linking to that forum post instead: http://www.mygarage.ro/componente/260080-clubul-amd-55.html#post3246809

 

Well.. I guess i could attach them here as well, don't see a problem posting them here as well. Hope it's ok, it's about 2 MB worth of images, sorry if someone's on low speed / limited traffic.

For one of the cards there are more pictures in the image gallery (links to those galleries are inside my post on that other site) with screenshots related to driver installation and some benchmarks, personally i didn't find them worth saving.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 26, 2016 by Godlygamer23
Put images into spoiler.

[3DOSH]

6 hours ago, mariushm said:

According to someone who received a card for review, AMD announced him that they'll release the recommended "benchmark drivers" /  official Polaris drivers on the 27th ... so whatever benchmarks reviewers already performed have the potential to be incorrect. Who knows, if we're lucky those drivers enable some things in the cards to make them faster...

 

There are pictures with the contents of XFX RX480 BLACK OC 1328M 8 GB edition box and it has a driver CD with version 16.20 RC6 written on the disc so I can only guess the official Polaris drivers are 16.20 or something to that effect.

 

i grabbed some pictures from two Baidu image galleries showing the contents of Sapphire Reference RX480 and XFX RX480 BLACK OC 1328M 8GB and posted them on another forum I use often, Baidu doesn't seem to work now at least for me so I'm linking to that forum post instead: http://www.mygarage.ro/componente/260080-clubul-amd-55.html#post3246809

 

Well.. I guess i could attach them here as well, don't see a problem posting them here as well. Hope it's ok, it's about 2 MB worth of images, sorry if someone's on low speed / limited traffic.

For one of the cards there are more pictures in the image gallery (links to those galleries are inside my post on that other site) with screenshots related to driver installation and some benchmarks, personally i didn't find them worth saving.

 

1328 mhz factory overclock with only 6 pin and reference cooler, cool stuff. If the optimized drivers are out on 27th, it confirm all the different scores we are getting, add to that the different editions with different factory OC's. 
Cant wait for the aftermarket ones

Edited June 26, 2016 by airdeano
Removed Quoted Images

[OptimisticRealist]

22 hours ago, lots of unexplainable lag said:

No thanks. Not shelling out $40 for a multiplayer-only game that's basically TF2 without the hats and more butts. Besides, I'm making maps for TF2, so why would I leave it?

Are you NUTS? It has 21 characters, each is very fun and has diverse mechanics.

 

40$ is nothing, it translates to hour of fun.

[byalexandr]

On 6/25/2016 at 3:46 AM, DXMember said:

like they are literally $200 apart.... there's no competition there - it's like does a Volkswagen compete with a Porsche?

Volkswagen OWNS Porsche

 

Edit: I mean it in a literal way, just in case you can't tell lol

[xAcid9]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

According to someone who received a card for review, AMD announced him that they'll release the recommended "benchmark drivers" /  official Polaris drivers on the 27th ... so whatever benchmarks reviewers already performed have the potential to be incorrect. Who knows, if we're lucky those drivers enable some things in the cards to make them faster...

 

There are pictures with the contents of XFX RX480 BLACK OC 1328M 8 GB edition box and it has a driver CD with version 16.20 RC6 written on the disc so I can only guess the official Polaris drivers are 16.20 or something to that effect.

Reviewers who just got the card few days ago received the new Crimson 16.6.2 beta driver as well which seem to be the proper launch driver for RX-480. The one in the box seems to be 16.5.2/3

[DXMember]

54 minutes ago, byalexandr said:

Volkswagen OWNS Porsche

 

Edit: I mean it in a literal way, just in case you can't tell lol

wow... then that means they actually do not compete... and they like divide the market or something... hell... i didn't know that when I typed it in... thanks... wow... what do you

but that's like super anti-open market...

[Trixanity]

2 minutes ago, DXMember said:

wow... then that means they actually do not compete... and they like divide the market or something... hell... i didn't know that when I typed it in... thanks... wow... what do you

but that's like super anti-open market...

Volkswagen owns a lot of brands:

Spoiler