Gadgetory

everyone I am Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're talking about I am these new 300 series the r9 380 and r9 390 specifically are the cards we got for review and we got these sapphire versions of the cards they are called nitro so this is sapphires new gaming line of our 9 300 series r7 300 series cards the review is already on the website so we saw that great the article and benchmarks and thorough benchmarks and power benchmarks are all there and we're gonna recap them here for the easy buddy and so the r9 390 and r9 380 are the same as the r9 290 and 280 with a few very small but according to Andy very noteworthy differences and those would include a 50 megahertz clock rate boost so you're boosting the core clock by about 50 megahertz and that also includes some power control and a couple of other changes so just to recap where we are in terms of specifications the lineup what's a refresh what's not here's a chart of the specs of the new cards we didn't get an r9 390x are seven three sixty or r7 370 but I did get the r9 390 and r9 380 and if you look at the specs here you'll see that they have the same stream processor account that's effectively the core count the clock rates boosted about 50 megahertz to a thousand megahertz for the r9 390 and boosted into the 970 range for the r9 380 another 40 to 50 megahertz boost and you'll see that the pixel rates and textile rate are bolstered as well and yet that's because these are calculated dependent upon the core clock so for the textile rate for instance your giggle texels per second rating that is calculated as a function of the core clock multiplied by the TM use so you multiply your texture map units by the core clock and that gives you your texels per second output which is shown here as slightly higher than the previous series in terms of price strategy Andy is still trying to come in a bit cheaper than their competitor and the r9 380 is about a $200 card that's the MSRP for reference the r9 280 the previous model which was superseded by the 285 the r9 280 is about a hundred and seventy one hundred fifty depending on rebates right now and the 285 is about two hundred dollars 280x is a little bit more than that the r9 390 the new card is a $330 card MSRP that's about a hundred dollars more than a post rebate r9 290 do you know at the post rebate there you get about 250 270 before rebates so still cheaper than the new r9 390 but that's to be expected with a new device you expect some performance gain so you would also expect to pay more money for it and the r7 three sixty and r7 370 which I don't have will be priced at 110 and 150 respectively those would be replacing the 260 and 270 and in terms of what the 300 series is meant to do AMD bragged in a call to the press that the r9 300 series is meant for gamers specifically those who want to play at 14 40 and 14 so it's targeting that higher resolution market which is something Nvidia is begun doing also the company further emphasized the importance of their 50 megahertz abuse to the clock and noted that they spent the last years or months at least working on power efficiency changes and clock rate changes so this 50 megahertz performance boost in theory is a little bit more than just overclocking 50 megahertz but we'll test that in the performance benchmarks momentarily now normally in a video this is where I update I wrote on the new GPU architecture but in the case of the 300 series we're stalling the island's GPU architecture so it's sort of just refresh as rebadge --is as they're called with some slight changes that are improvements over the previous iterations so just to recap everyone bring everyone up to speed on what's been going on the last few years the HD 7970 if you remember that card was based on Tahiti it was a very powerful card for its time the Tahiti card was rebadged as an are 9 to 80 they are effectively identical not perfectly identical but pretty close and then the r9 285 was refresh of the 280 it's similar to the 280 but it uses an offshoot of the architecture called Tonga Tonga has some featured changes from the 280 and the 7970 it introduces about 3 years of extra features from AMD so it's not a huge architectural overhaul by any means but VCE and some other things like that have been changed into 285 the 285 also brought with it things like UV SR which has not yet been introduced to the 200 series it was supposed to be but hasn't been yet so 285 has VSR and the 280 does not that's where we stand with those the 300 series still Islands still the same as the 200 in terms of architecture but introduces again a few small changes so along with some other things there's a new framerate tuning protocol in the software and the catalyst drivers you can say I want to cap my framerate at 80 fps if it ever is gonna exceed 80 fps then cap it and that allow is basically the GPU to throttle and Limited's power consumption this isn't something practically that will get a lot of use unfortunately because the time is when it will exceed the limiter framerate for most people you probably want to cap it at like 120 if you're on a faster monitor the times that exceeds that are gonna be in cutscenes or things like that they will be very limited and the power consumption saved is is basically non-consequential compared to just a GPU architecture overhaul the Sapphire cards we looked at are part of the new nitro line made by sapphire and this nitro branding initiative is sapphires approach to making the 300 series cards an emphatic statement for where they believe Andy currently rests in the markets so sapphire and AMD both take a similar narrative their narrative is that the 300 cards are for gamers who don't care about extra features they don't care about things like maybe CUDA acceleration in Photoshop where you would benefit from CUDA cores and they don't the buyers of these cards would not necessarily care about the lower TDP they're ok with a 275 watt card and something that runs a little bit hotter so that's sort of the is that AMD thinks their devices are perfectly fine for the raw framerate output that they provide for the price they are listed at and that's not necessarily right or wrong but that's that's how it's presented to us as journalists so I wanted to convey that to you all through AMD rather than editorializing it and that's where the the market positioning is performance is really what matters most at the top level and we drill down into wattage and and heat and unfortunately the performance of these 300 series cards is very disappointing we'll get the drivers momentarily and a completely different issue but the performance gain is about three to six percent if you already have a 200 series card you can see in these charts there's really not much reason to upgrade especially for the price premium because obviously you've got to pay whatever you paid originally at a minimum and then the extra cost for the new series so if you have a 280 there's no reason to buy 380 if you have a 290 there's no reason to buy 390 and so forth and r9 290 is 90 80 70 at a minimum cheaper than the r9 390 right now that might change as fine demand changes but it's cheaper and it performs pretty much the same as the 390 so if you must buy one of these cards if you have to buy an AMD device and you're looking at this price range I would say go buy the 290 or 280 or 200 series equivalent to the 300 device you're looking at because the price is just substantially better the performance is similar and it might even put you into another price class up if you can bump down to the 200 series and as sort of disappointing as the performance is for the 300 series the drivers are much more disappointing we actually could not use the newest drivers andy has a new driver set called 15.15 we could only use these for the 300 series cards they did not work with the 200 series cards that should be noted we can install them they just didn't work at all and we had driver installation issues with 300 so I had to completely wipe all the existing drivers I had to sort of nuke the driver install base and then make sure I installed only the 15.15 are only the 15.5 whatever the previous beta is for the 200 series so just don't cleanly over right which is okay because we can work around that what's not okay is the flickering that I discovered on the r9 390 primarily I think I saw it on 380 as well but definitely on the 390 we saw a lot of black flickering and this happened on two types of monitors I have not monitors g-sync and monitors without g-sync so basically all monitors and the flickering was basically just two times per minute at a minimum for a minimum of five seconds each times for ten seconds per minute and our testing we would see flickering and it would be several seconds at a time screen would turn black he'd come back turned black come back and sometimes that was associated with a framerate drop sometimes it was not and when it was not that's where you can't just rely on the raw FPS numbers in the chart because the FPS looks fine but in reality is actually unplayable on the 390 in most games that we tested and on the test top because of this black flickering that totally interrupts tree game experience and this is an extension of a problem Andy's had lately where there drivers just are really sorely lacking and if Andy were to spend a year or two years working on anything right now I would much rather they fix their drivers than refresh cards I know it doesn't really work that way you have software teams of hardware team but in terms of division of resources the drivers sorely need updating the last major release was in December that was the last stable launch that was last with all certified launch and then we've had beta drivers thankfully for GTA 5 came out almost immediately basically immediately day one or day zero and the witcher 3 had drivers come out shortly after the witcher launched it was following a sort of quote-unquote controversy about game works and AMD had drivers that needed to be updated so it's been quite a while and that's the major focal point for AMD at this point going forward is driver fixes so that they work more consistently on multiple hardware configurations without this flickering and things like that going on because no matter how well these cards perform if the drivers aren't working with them if they're not cooperating it really doesn't matter what the frame rate is because you just can't play when your screens turning black that stated the 290 the 290x the 280 and the 285 that we tested are all perfectly fine we did not see this flickering issue with the 290 X with a 280 the 280x and they play fine the frame rates slightly lower a couple percent but it's very easy to overclock those cards by 50 megahertz and get a similar performance gain not exactly the same because you have some thermal gains as well but pretty close effectively identical what you're looking at now is a thermal chart sapphire's thermals are very impressive as much as I am these frame rate performance is somewhat disappointing for gains over the 200 series the thermal performance of sapphires coolers is good they've done a good job with these coolers sapphires coolers keep the known hot and e-chips at around 45 Celsius delta T over ambient beaten only by these tricks 960 which is a much cooler GPU consumes fewer watts so of course it's going to be cooler and the liquid cooled hybrid which is liquid cooled and by the way we reviewed that the article is on the website and the video will be up shortly now for the power chart the max system power low this is peak system load of the r9 390 and r9 380 places the cards in the 260 and 340 ish watt range for system power consumption this is total power consumption when the GPU is under 100% load from loopy and firestrike benchmarks in terms of the verdict unfortunately I just can't recommend the 300 series right now because the 200 series is so close in performance it's cheaper currently at least and it doesn't have the driver issues that we saw in the 300 series I'm sure there's will be resolved eventually but until that point I can't recommend them and feel confident in that recommendation the 390 and 380 if they come down in price if they're similar to the 200 cities in price sure they're fine buys there's certainly an argument to be made for raw performance output certainly an argument to be made against levy lower TDP of the Nvidia cards and favoring the framerate output of AMD that's really up to you to decide you need to look at your system build list and say you know am I looking for a low thermal system am i building in a small form-factor box do I need to keep the thermals down things like that if you don't care about those things the AMD series is okay to look at but then your next concern is drivers so until the drivers are resolved in a fashion that is more compatible installation wise more compatible flickering wise it's not a recommendation I can push but the cards are still a consideration in the future as Andy iterates its drivers and of course the fury cards will be coming out shortly I think we're having a little bit trouble securing those but I'm working on it if I have to I'll buy one myself and we'll get a fury review online hopefully that new feejee architecture will be the overhaul that AMD needs to get back into the game firmly and do some head-to-head battling with Nvidia the top range these battle at the mid-range and the low end but they don't have anything really fighting the 980ti right now and that is a pretty serious price point to get involved with because then you get a halo effect so that is AMD as it stands now the 300 series check the link in the description below for the full article and our patreon page by the way is up and running we've got a link to that following the end of this video please check that out if you like this type of content you want to support us and help our objective approach to coverage with more depth that is all for this time I will see you all next time