There was a leak earlier in the week which pointed towards the 490 having 8gb gddr5, not HBM2. Since we know that Vega will be using HBM2, that pointed towards Vega not being the 490, but with no other chips in the pipeline, there wasn't much for AMD to do aside from a dual gpu card. Also hints at AMD trying to push multi gpu some more (AMD master plan).
Well, there is a bright side. If dual Polaris is the 490, and Vega is the Fury replacement, then Vega must be more than twice as fast as the 480. Likely significantly. So that gives us a general idea of the performance.
I agree about preferring a single high end chip, but if multi gpu gets to be where it has no real issues, then the price to performance ratio of the high end should get much better as yields with smaller chips is much better. We might see a significantly more linear performance vs price graph across gpu lineups.
The DX12 obfuscation layer for the gpus may continue to help promote multi gpu adoption.
If we ignore the games where crossfire scaling is broken (and therefore doesn't accurately reflect the performance scaling), then the 490 should rival the 1080. That puts Vega somewhere in the vicinity of the 1080ti. Whether it will be the high side or the low side of it, I can only guess, but I would bet spitting distance either way. Though it would make for a strange line up, with a large performance and gap between the 480 and the 490 while the low end has three cards within $100.
It's wishful thinking though to think a dual RX 480 is going to run flawlessly considering that even the regular RX 480 doesn't run very good overclocking unless you undervolt the GPU. I am afraid that power issues could get more series, since the RX 490 is going to use a similar amount of power to my single R9 390, but hey, 0-60% more performance depending on how well a game can deal with Crossfire.
I don't even care much about who wins the GPU wars, I am just seeing now which company can screw themselves the hardest, AMD or NVidia.
Yeah pretty disappointed. Especially since DX12 Multi adapter really isn't a thing and a lot of games either don't support CF or the scaling is garbo. Also dumb that it is only 8GB...
The rumor says priced like a 1080. Jesus... AMD must be out of their minds.
I don't mind DUAL if they can do it without crossfire and crap, look the crossfire support is crap and doesn't even exist under Linux. So if they try and make the 490 a crossfire card only, meaning if you can't get crossfire enabled in the game or if its not supported properly, then you get a standard 480 for your price/performance, then its going to be a SUPER SUPER FLOP!
Not interested in fighting to get crossfire working in all the games I play (and platforms).
I'm sure that if the card has two gpu's the system isn't going to register it as a crossfire set up since they're both coming in from the same pcie slot.
the new titan is supposed to be twice as powerful as the 1080 so vega being up with the 1080 ti is unlikely though i dont see why it shouldnt be. im mean look at the fury x, we should not only be seeing hbm2(which will increase performance at high res), but also more than twice as many cores and rops and etc and also much higher clockrates due to the smaller process.
Yes, yes they can. Their engineers already proved that with their way out of spec PCI power draw on the RX 480. I'm giving them a benefit of a doubt and say their engineers aren't that incompetent. In all likely hood the top dogs at AMD told them to rush the the product for Summer season window of release.
PCPer, said it best: It’s clear now that the RX 480 should not have shipped with the power configuration it had. It was out of spec, and sometimes by a surprisingly high amount. I have talked several times about how this could have been avoided (8-pin power, more validation) so I don’t feel the need to harp on it again. I’m told that internally there are more changes being made to the design and product team to make sure this doesn’t happen again. But for AMD, there can’t be any more issues; the Radeon Technologies Group needs to focus on the straight and narrow going forward. -source
No, dual gpu needs crossfire to work unless you have an API abstraction layer to make the game think that it is one pool of resources. So far, DX12 is the only API that does that. (Perhaps Vulkan can support it as well, but Vulkan is incredibly rare atm).