Gadgetory

let's continue our thorough investigation of the RX 480 AMD's newest release I've already uploaded my initial review of the RX 40 check it out right here as well as a discussion on the power draw issue which I experienced firsthand by the way in an ultra cheap PC simulating a sharp CPU bottleneck indulge yourself in those curiosities once this first part moves out of the way now remember what the intent of the RX 480 is not was but is nothing has changed since the release date this video card exists for the sake of budget-conscious gamers in both 1080p and 1440p AMD also claims that VR is a possibility with this card if paired with an adequate platform but I'm not big into VR as of yet and experiences for the most part are fairly subjective so what I decided to do in this video was pair the card with my gtx 980ti now i've already discussed explicit multi adapter and grande detail in a video you can check out right here but something I did not mention because I accidentally edited that segment of the video out before the final cut is that GPU order matters and what I mean by that is that the card arrangement in terms of which is placed on the top PCIe slot and which is placed underneath subsequently can dramatically affect performance this is why I placed my 980ti in the top slot when I ran a simultaneously with the gtx 1070 the 980ti was the better performer and theoretically had I rotated the two frame rates would have fractionally diminished with this combination however I'm just morbidly curious clearly the 90 DTI is the all-around better card and according to these independent tests that is with only one card and a test bench at a time the 980ti yielded twice the frame rate of the arts 480 across the board but what will happen when we place the RX 480 in the top slot like so and the gtx 980ti which is in the recurrently underneath it mid-range card with one of the best available and then again in Reverse what will happen when we place the 980ti on the top and the RX for 80 underneath and up the chitchat on my end let's find out first up was the RX 480 in the top slot keep in mind this is also the card from which our display cable will run i had to install both the AMD crimson driver for the 480 as well as the nvidia driver from scratch these weren't plug-and-play once both cards were installed and detected I hopped into ashes of the singularity DirectX 12 mode and enabled multi GPU support the results shocked me a bit in all honesty I expected the frame rates to fall somewhere just above the kiai is independent frame rates but that was not the case at all in fact in two of the three batches and the average overall the combo didn't keep up with a single TI disappointing given the fact that the combo hypothetically would have cost an additional 33% here in the US so what this is telling me is that explicit multi adapter is leveraging the primary display device much more heavily than I presumed it was I actually came up with an analogy to help explain this a little better yeah bear with me on this one I want you to picture a wagon got it a wagon and a gentleman by the name of rx already up front he's a fairly fast fellow not the quickest but efficient and productive he's pulling the wagon at his usual pace again quickly but not the quickest now imagine a second gentleman or woman I suppose in this case pushing the same wagon from behind her name is gtx 980ti now she is quick I'm talking Usain Bolt quick and she uses her insane speed to push the wagon from behind as fast as she can well she wants to but there's a problem she's being held up by the RX 40 up front she'll give the 480 a boost and force him to pull good bit faster but if she pushes too fast she'll topple the 480 and tear some flesh off his bones equivalent to the massive screen tearing see what I did there he would experience if a very weak card was paired with an overpowered one and this is why it's recommended to cards of similar compute performance be paired together otherwise you'll have one card rendering individual tiles at lightning-fast rates and the other card lagging far behind with its tile rendering hence the screen tearing by the way I tried pairing the 980ti with my g2 10 as promised it's a card with 2,816 cuda cores paired with a card posting only 16 of those but was unable to open the game the RX 480 thankfully is nowhere near this week it still holds its own it doesn't slow down the 92 TI to any substantial extent however it is worth noting that the 480 did prevent the 980 TI underneath from rendering tiles of each frame at its full speed following suit we have the 92 TI paired with the rx 480 in which the ti was inserted into the top slot and the RS 40 was inserted into the one underneath the display cable was plugged into the 980 TI the primary display device I should note at this point that I had to reinstall both sets of drivers the computer freaked out booted into its ultra low resolution mode and prompted for driver updates when I switched them so I uninstalled everything and reinstalled both sets starting first with the primary display driver it is recommended that you install in this order and as for the results better not significantly better but better overall and across the board we're looking at around 15 to 20 percent frame rate gains still not enough in my opinion to justify the second cards existence but I expect better optimization in the future to increase these margins also keep in mind that ashes is currently the only game that officially supports explicit multi adapter so unless you plan on playing only ashes of the singularity on your bright and shiny new rig which I highly doubt don't go this route in this case the 90 DT I was pulling the wagon from the front at its usual lightning fast pace and was being aided by the RX for 80 from behind in this arrangement in the 90 DT I wasn't being held back by the 4 a rather the TI was forcing the 480 to keep up and every now and then a few steps of the 480 would push the wagon even faster remember the efficiency of this direct x12 technology depends almost entirely on the performance gap between the two cards being paired AMD cards appeared to do a bit better than nvidia in this regard thanks to hardware based asynchronous compute and reduce driver overhead and again cards that similar compute performance work better in tandem i tested an r9 380 with the RX 480 and found that the results of this pair weren't far from those obtained from the RX 480 plus 980 TI combination although the total price of the AMD set was significantly lower likewise pairing the gtx 980ti with the gtx 1070 you'll did massive gains as well 50% overall from just a single 980ti so here it is folks the current state of explicit multi adapter let's hope this trend continues in future DirectX 12 titles the possibilities are endless here and it appears as though EMA is as efficient if not more efficient than the current states of both SLI and crossfire if you like the experiments conducted in this video be sure to give this thing a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if you feel the complete opposite or if you hate everything about life be sure to follow me on twitter at sc/st salazar got the little yeah just look at that right there it's also in the description as well along with my facebook and instagram handles and I guess URL for the Facebook thing be sure to suggest future video ideas in the comment sections below remember I read all comments I really do I scroll i actually today i scroll through like 230 of them and are applied to about 20 i'm about a 10% chance i'll respond if you respond a day after the videos and post it I tend to read most of my comments immediately after the videos been uploaded I just stick around so I'll upload the video and then I'll refresh the page every minute or so and respond to as many of them as I can so if you catch the video early you might be able to talk with me a little bit more be sure to stay tuned we're going to do one more experiment with the arts for a team on a parrot with the FX 6300 should be interesting being that that right now is a pretty good sweet spot for the average CPU in a gaming rig and so I'll be able to throw that in there we'll see how that works out and I'm just kind of blabbing on at this point because I want the video to seem longer than it actually is this is science studio thanks for learning with us you