Gadgetory

look at how far we've come from the Radeon HD 3870 launched back in 2007 to the RX 480 a ton has changed AMD is using a manufacturing process for nodes smaller the current king has double the PCIe bandwidth up to 16 times the video frame buffer size support for DirectX 12 and Vulcan vs DX 10.1 and it actually costs less so let's take a look at AMD video card innovation over the last 10 years and see how it is that we got here the master Keys Pro keyboard lineup from Coolermaster is available in three sizes each in white or RGB flavours check them out at the link below we already had quite a few of the representatives we needed of AMD's top single GPU graphics card for each generation but there were a few codename xt cards missing from our pokedex so this project began as so many seem to have lately with eBay dot CA because Canadians don't get the good eBay for our test we went with a high-end modern test bench to avoid bottlenecks and we ran a mix of synthetic benchmarks and games both modern and it kills me to think of things I played as a teenager as classic or retro but we've got some of that too first up is the Radeon HD 3870 this was truly a dark time for the AMD rebellion their previous generation flagship 2900 XP with its groundbreaking but very expensive 512 bit memory bus had just gotten its but soundly kicked by Nvidia SGA T so it was time for a strategy shift instead of building a huge complex GPU AMD built a smaller more efficient one relying on crossfire technology to reach the high-end enthusiast market thanks to being built on a 55 verses 18 and a meter process the 3870 managed to perform similarly while being much cheaper than its predecessor and II looked to build on the success of that lower performance but lower risk strategy with the 4870 codename rv770 xt was a substantially larger chip than the 38 70 at 256 millimeters squared but that extra performance and frame buffer sizes up to two gigs allowed AMD to commend a higher price and that still just over half the size of their last attempt at a big GPU the Radeon HD 5870 marked a return to confidence for AMD with over two billion transistors a move from their terascale to terascale to architecture bringing with it DirectX 11 support implementation of PCIe gen 2.1 and a process shrink from 55 nanometer to 40 nanometer it was an ambitious project not to mention that this was the beginning of AMD's push for multi display gaming technology that they called Eyefinity 5870 performed very well against invidious furnace of a GTX 480 and still holds up well enough today but it might be worth modding your cooler if your fan dies the HD 6970 built on this success again and the officially dubbed its architecture terascale 3 but due to TSM C's cancelled 32 nanometer node it was actually built on the same 40 nanometer manufacturing process so performance wasn't dramatically better with die size transistor count and notably power consumption all rising substantially that lasts in particular was a trend that just couldn't continue indefinitely the HD 7970 was another huge undertaking AMD went from 2.6 for to over 4 billion transistors with a wide 384 bit memory interface they moved to the 28 nanometer manufacturing process they added support for PCI Express gen3 to the amusement of enthusiasts who noted that AMD motherboard chipsets didn't and up until very recently fail didn't have official support for it and introduced the world to the DirectX 12 and Vulcan compatible GCN architecture that has been the beating heart of every AMD card and apu since not to mention the current gen game consoles from all three of the big players it's compelling performance and forward-looking feature set ended up saving AMD a lot of our d-money in subsequent years the 7970 was introduced as a top-of-the-line cart but would end up being recycled twice as the 7970 gigahertz edition and 280x in lieu of developing new GPUs to compete with nvidia step down 700 series cards the Radeon HD 290x that came next was a formal return in many ways to the home run swing strategy that had ultimately led AMD down over half a decade prior it was huge slightly larger than the 2900 XT it rocked over 6 billion transistors it had a 512 bit memory bus again and ran an upgraded version of GC n dubbed GC n 2nd gen which all sounds great on paper but it was damn near impossible to manufacture at a reasonable cost it ran hotter than summer on the tropical island where they hosted the launch event and sounded like the jet that I flew there on it's killer features mantle and trueaudio were absorbed or ignored and it took over a year of driver development to reach its full potential at which time AMD promptly relaunched it as 390x they called it granada xt instead of hawaii xt and claimed to have tweaked it but evidence for actual changes to the hardware beyond the availability of higher density memory chips that enabled it to ship with eight gigs of vram and small process improvements at the chip fab level to achieve slightly higher rated clock speeds has never materialized our nine fury acts on the other hand was not a rebadged for sure this thing made Hawaii and Grenada look like toys it introduced a new generation of GCN with a high quality video scaler and lossless delta color compression it was the first GPU to use HBM or high bandwidth memory which is high-performance 3d stacked DRAM next to the GPU for a marketed 4096 bit memory interface and boasted a completely ludicrous 596 millimeter squared I was just shy of 9 billion transistors I mean I don't blame them you got to do what you got to do to appease PCMR is insatiable lust for frame rates and the GPU industry had been stuck with 28 nanometer manufacturing for well over three years but when your flagship graphics card needs a prepackaged water cooler it might be time to take your foot off the gas pedal which is exactly what they did just over four years later Andy came full circle abandoning the revolutionary new features of their previous flagship in favor of something a little more practical if Siri X was a Ferrari then our X 480 is an EcoBoost Mustang are you sure it's not as fast but it consumes just over half as much power is available with up to double the vram since unlike HBM gddr5 is available on the cheap does this with a guy size that's less than half partially thanks to a shiny new 14 nanometer manufacturing process and oh did I mention it's less than a third of the price though with all that said I wouldn't count out AMD as a high-end competitor just yet they played it safe this generation by launching the sweet spot GPU first but we've seen working high-end hardware and Vega is coming thanks for watching AMD GPUs through the ages you can check out our previous episodes on Intel CPUs and water blocks which we'll have hopefully over there and you can leave a comment if you have suggestions for future follow-ups are you a freelancer or small business owner and looking for a way to be more 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