Tech Guru wrote1- Actually, for me....AMD is......near DEATH. Their CPU business died years ago, and today their GPUs all seem to lack....competence. The very presence of that radiator on the FURY X is a sign of their desperation. They are going to clock the bejesus out of that card to put up numbers that resemble a 980ti. But look at the pricing...if it were any faster...any faster at all...they would demand a higher price to pay for the more expensive HBM implementation. I know that benchmarks are coming, but the bigger story will be the aesthetics. Having to find a place for that Radiator is deal breaker, and the air cooled Fury Vanilla (or whatever the it's called) is not going to put up some great numbers....obviously just look at the pricing...it never lies.
AMD isn't near death, not at all actually, their main source of money is the CPU market, read: Opterons, their CPU business isn't anywhere near dead, it's still the best bang-for-buck for consumers, the FX-6300 crushes all of Intel's i3s in multi-threaded workloads while only costing 90$. The Fury X and it's radiator aren't a sign of desperation, not all, it's just because they want to give OC headroom to customers, anyone that's buying a 650$ GPU while have a case that supports a 120mm radiator, the Fury will be of great value as it performs the same as the Fury X but has a little lower OC headroom, cooling will not be a problem, PowerColor's Devil 13 was a 500W and had a three fan design that never made it overheat, why would a 275W card overheat then ? AMD has always been the company that offers great cards for low prices, they do care about revenues but they're nowhere as greedy as Nvidia, pricing the Fury X at 650$ will still allow them revenues while beating the 980 Ti in price-to-performance. About pricing, why is it only bad when AMD does it ? Nvidia were the ones that made people pay 350$ more for just 3-4% fps increase.
Tech Guru wrote2- AMD's poor showing of driver support has made it difficult to recommend the company's cards even when they're able to push a reasonable frame rate. The new devices are OK for the price, but not exciting. NVidia holds a clear and obvious day-1 driver advantage, showing a track record of game-ready, verified drivers on launch day where AMD has failed to compete. For builders who are comfortable waiting an extra day or two on game-ready drivers, the price decrease for AMD can be worthwhile – especially in the mid-range and entry-level markets.
AMD's drivers are currently top-notch, AMD cards sometimes don't need driver updates to run new games, provided they're not CrapWorks games.
Tech Guru wrote3- the R9 300 cards are AMD's go-to device. AMD wants to sell to users who care first and foremost about FPS, with little regard for TDP and temperature so long as it's cheap and games.The company needs to get its drivers in order before we can confidently recommend any 300-series products, but it is possible for them to achieve the angle they're targeting -- it's just going to require more joint software-hardware effort. - MSI's R9 390X Gaming actually consumes much more power than the R9 290X, requiring around 350 W during typical gaming, with peaks at up to 370 W. The only card requiring more power is the R9 295X2. But not only gaming power consumption is high as multi-monitor and Blu-ray power consumption are increased too. Those two scenarios have been an issue on AMD cards for a long time, and things are even worse now. 98 W GPU power consumption just to playback a Blu-ray is simply insane. NVIDIA does the job with around 10 W, so there is no way a R9 390X should go into your media PC. Overall, the MSI R9 390X Gaming has one of the worst performance-per-watt ratings, worse than the R9 295X2. NVIDIA's GTX 980 is over twice as power efficient!
As I already said, the 300 series is just a placeholder for the 400 series, Arctic Islands, which will bring much lower power usage, and heat and much higher performance-per-watt than the older series, now let's just take a second to remember that up until Kepler Nvidia had more power usage and heat than AMD cards, does Thermi ring any bells ? The 400 series will bring as much as 5x the performance-per-watt of the 200/300 series, the R9 Nano is a fine preview of that, using only 175W and achieving nearly the performance of a Fury X, which is more than an 980 Ti.
Tech Guru wrote4-AMD out on the fact that it has been pushing the R9 390/X series as a great experience for 4K gaming. AMD uses the fact that these video cards now have 8GB of VRAM and are on a 512-bit memory bus for the fact that these will perform great at 4K.Let's be honest though, this R9 390X video card in a single GPU configuration simply does not deliver great 4K gaming. The AMD Radeon R9 290X video cards were never known as great 4K gaming video cards, and the AMD Radeon R9 390/X is just a re-brand of those so why should it all the sudden be awesome at 4K?Therefore on its own the Radeon R9 390X is not a worthy 4K card, but put two of these together in CrossFire and it just might be.Both the 390 and 390X come standard with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That, combined with the 512-bit memory bus on the 390 and 390X are the primary selling points for AMD to spout "great" 4K gaming. However, as we all know, memory alone does not make performance.
I can say nothing here, but the R9 390X in CF can run most games at 4K provided it's not at ultra settings nor you're enabling anti-aliasing, which isn't needed at 4K. But the Titan X can't run all games at 4K 60FPS and it has 12GB of memory, which is also unneeded.
Tech Guru wrote5-R9 390x does not compete with GTX 980, it competes with GTX 970, and it's head to head l, all GTX 970 comes ahead in most titles. If you are looking at 4k benchmarks get it out of your head. 4k bench 390x beats 970 and is behind 980, but NONE are playable! Those cards are 1080p or 1440p. If you don't want to spend money for 980 which is an amazing card, the right choice is 970 not 390x.-AMD did not bring enough to the table with this card to increase market share. 390 uses 100w more than GTX 970 while offering marginally better performance and sacrificing the ability to do things like HDMI 2.0 and GSync. 100w higher under load means the 390 will be significantly louder as well.
The R9 290X runs head-to-head with the GTX 970 at 1080p and crushes it at higher resolutions, the R9 390X is an improved 290X and comes ahead in most titles as per Tom's Hardware's benchmarks of the R9 390X. HDMI 2.0 is only needed for 4K 60Hz which the GTX 970 won't realistically be capable of, especially with the 3.5 GB of VRAM.
Tech Guru wrote6-There are 3 fan Maxwell cards that run cooler than AMD's Lame Old
ReBranded GPUs, its ALL about the Watts, More Watt Sucked = More Heat so
they're NOT the same.
The Tri-X cooler allows the R9 290X to run at nearly 70C under load while staying quiet. You're again being unfair in your comparisons, compating a stock cooler with a 3-fan custom one.
Tech Guru wroteAll three of the GPUs in AMD’s newest graphics cards are being pushed
as far as they will go. If you like to overclock, don’t count on a lot
of available headroom.
Let's see when the Fury lineup comes out.
The ball is now in Tech Guru (Nvidia fanboy)'s court.