When do the next generation GPUs drop?

As is common for AMD, it looks like they will be forced to compete on price, not performance.

Sub-1080 performance makes absolutely no sense. It’s a monstrously large chip, estimated at 70% larger than than the 1080. GPU performance scales reasonable well with die size, and e.g. RX 480 and 1060 were basically the same performance with roughly the same die size (RX 480 was 10% larger). The obvious bottleneck would be memory, but with HBM2 they’ve got more than double the memory bandwidth of a RX 480, 60% more than the 1080. If they can’t convincingly beat the 1080 on performance, they might as well shut down further development.

Now, AMD always disappoint. But I’d bet the problem will be with power consumption once again, not with performance. They’ll promise finally having it under control, but end up shipping with 275W TDP instead.

AMD has had problems with performance and power consumption many, many times. No reason to think Vega will be any different from what we’ve seen so far.

Ryzen looks promising, though.

It will always be bigger/hotter. AMD just doesn’t have the same engineering resources that Nvidia has to tweak and customize their chip designs. An equivalent performance Geforce GPU will be smaller and lower power than what AMD can do.

HMB/HBM2 based cards like Fury and the new Vega cards can be extremely small since the memory isn’t spread all over the PCB the way GDDR5.

The Polaris cards also had the disadvantage of being manufactured on Globalfoundries’ 14nm FinFet process which is apparently not as good as the TSMC 16nm process the nVidia Pascal chips are made on.

Just installed an MSI RX470 4GB card. Heck of an upgrade from my ancient Zotac GT640 2GB, and it came in under my self-imposed hard limit of CAD$300.

I’ve installed the reference drivers off the AMD site. Anyone know if I’m missing anything by not using the MSI driver set?

Nope, use the AMD drivers.

You may want MSI afterburner for metrics and overclocking.

Good lord this thing is LOUD.

…and that’s why I refuse to go back to AMD.

My EVGA 1060 is almost just as loud as my previous AMD card. Manufacturer and fan design has just as much to do with it as GPU brand.

My 1070 was insanely loud at first. But then I realized that it just wasn’t communicating its fan speed to the motherboard, and the slightest hint of heat caused it to go to 100% speed. One motherboard BIOS update later, it’s nice and quiet.

This is why i bounce between several brands and also AMD and nVidia. I base my purchase on model and brand and reviews. I feel like I’ve been around long enough to see them all f up at least once.

Given my experience with an FE 1070, not sure I buy that. My guess is that @Thraeg is on the right track and the fan is running at high speed unnecessarily.

Fan is at 46% right now according to EVGA’s monitoring app. At 57% it’s clearly louder than any other fan/noise than the room, at 100% (which thankfully it’s never gone to, but that might change come Summer), it’s much louder than my old Radeon 6950. My 4870 I think was louder though, it’s been a while.

It’s not bad at all at it’s idle speed, I’m just trying to balance rei’s comment and say that AMD isn’t loud by default, and I’m guessing the 470 being discussed is louder than normal. Just like according to you guys my 1060 is louder than normal.

But you know, someone says this thing is loud and everyone just agrees, “yep, they’re all loud.” When these people have had like one AMD video card 10 years ago.

The Radeon RX 480 does really well under load. During our gaming loop, it’s no louder than Nvidia’s reference GeForce GTX 1070. This is in spite of its higher power consumption, simpler cooling solution and more mainstream construction.

I picked Tom’s because they don’t go easy on AMD like Anandtech. Here’s the ASUS Strix 470, which uses a different fan layout and a little more aggressive overclocking.

A result of 37.1 dB(A) is fairly high compared to many similar graphics cards. Fortunately, the Strix RX 470’s acoustic output spans the entire spectrum and doesn’t include a lot of gear or motor noises. The voltage converters don’t really make their presence known either. Then again, that could be due to the cooling fan’s noise drowning out other sounds.

Picking the right card matters if you care about noise, not Green team or Red team.

Thanks, I did look at this, but it’s not the case for me. :)

My experience is based on being a former SPCR devotee and going though over 20 video cards in the last 10 years. Green Team overwhelmingly has had quieter and cooler (at stock) cards.

My Asus 1060 is pretty quiet, even on heavy load, so quiet that I was worried the fans were not working. They were, games just don’t force it to kick up into above 50% fan speeds that much. It is a blower style card, which I like for my fan setup. (Air coming in from front of case, both cpu (watercooled) and gpu exhaust out the back.

So very very happy with my 1060 so far. Running games at 1080p at maxed settings with no problems in fps so far. Forza Horizon 3 has been iffy, but that game seems to be pretty poorly optimized all around.

Oh yeah, I like my 1060 bunches. Performance is great for the price, which is why I grabbed it. It’s a single fan model so maybe that explains the noise. Or maybe I got one with a loud fan.

I think this has absolutely been true generally, until the new RX4xx series. Have you had one of those? It sounds like you wrote off AMD and won’t be buying their cards anymore.

I think the manufacturing partners for nVidia have been doing a better job than AMD’s. Maybe nVidia’s reference designs are just better. Or maybe the AMD chips have been really hot up to this point so everything was loud, and now that they released a lower power chip which is cooler the partners haven’t spent the energy to make things quieter on their non-reference designs since expectations allow for loud cards. Or maybe AMD is really shitty or conservative with their fan curves.

Entirely possible. But as I said before, I have a Founder Edition (so single fan, stock nVidia design) 1070 and it isn’t loud at all. I don’t have a 1060, but I can’t imagine why it would be that much louder than a 1070 unless it had some custom fan setup that was just crazy loud or (as you said) a bad fan or a fan that was running too high unnecessarily. Bad thermals in the cpu case would be another possibility I suppose.

That’s true, I last had AMD with a pair of 7970s. CrossFire didn’t help the noise to be sure.

I looked at them again when the Fury came out but all the reviews said they still trailed in noise and efficiency in addition to performance. I mostly wrote them off mostly because of the inferior driver support. A lot of the slack was picked up by the RadeonPro util writer but I think he’s dropped the project because he’s been hired at AMD recently.