AMD Radeon R9-285 review

#4904551

somemadcaaant

2014-09-02 14:03

Jesus what an ugly bugger.

#4904555

Fender178

2014-09-02 14:06

Jesus what an ugly bugger.

You said it. I couldn't agree more.

#4904569

Dictator93

2014-09-02 14:25

What a pointless card. 3 years of 7900 series cards, just repackaged with lsightly different feature sets... all with barely defalting prices.

#4904573

DarkKnightDude

2014-09-02 14:35

Nice pricepoint, though seems rather pointless. Power efficiency still needs obvious work.

#4904575

Undying

2014-09-02 14:40

Slower than 280X with less vram. Its even bad overclocker... Well if price goes down to 200€ it can be decent 1080p performer. Nice review HH. 🙂

#4904585

Slikar

2014-09-02 15:00

I guess , it does what it's meant to right? Competes very well with 760/280(non X) and supports all the latest and yet to come AMD technologies. For me only thing bad about it is memory amount and power draw, no big reasons to upgrade from mine either.

#4904605

mohiuddin

2014-09-02 15:36

it gained 1130mhz on default voltage on Techpower-up Sapphire dual-x review. May be Hilbert was unlucky this time. :P

#4904611

Rich_Guy

2014-09-02 15:46

Fail card, less ram, smaller bus, slower than a 280x, and at a higher price, yes, i know the 280s are now EOL, but theres places got thousands of em in stock still, so you would just get one of those instead, until they are no more. True Audios pointless, its only in Thief up to now, and its hardly used, Mantles crap as well, not needed at all, the games are fast enough in Dx11, by the time the Mantle patches come out for games, they've long been completed, Sniper Elite V3 still hasnt got its patch yet, and its been out bloody months now, supposed to be the odd game coming with it from the off, but those again, will no doubt be fine under Dx11, just whats the point in Mantle, if yer already getting around 100fps in Dx11, and with Dx12 coming, supposedly the same thing, Mantle will be no more.

#4904629

-Tj-

2014-09-02 16:07

^ Well its a 760GTX rival and it does well there.. AMD didnt say it will be anything more.

#4904633

Fender178

2014-09-02 16:14

Which is a 280 replacement. So that is why its slower than a 280x. So I don't get the complaints of it being slower than the 280x.

#4904636

DarkKnightDude

2014-09-02 16:20

It does come with all the featuresets I guess. Its a good card to replace the R280, but nothing more.

#4904661

Lane

2014-09-02 17:02

Ok 2 things, actually Mantle in BF4 and Thief are not supported, well its just a question of driver ... Tonga have some different improvement on tesselation and new form of compression for frame buffer color data. ( 40% bump in memory bandwith efficiency ) . Will be fixed, but the driver ( mostly the game ) had the reviewer dont have the fix . TR report on Thief Mantle : http://techreport.com/review/26997/amd-radeon-r9-285-graphics-card-reviewed/7 But now the interesting thing: There's some new change on the architectures who are underliying compared to Hawaii. And we dont know yet all... http://techreport.com/review/26997/amd-radeon-r9-285-graphics-card-reviewed/2

By far the most consequential innovation in Tonga is a new form of compression for frame buffer color data. GPUs have long used various forms of compression in order to store color information more efficiently, but evidently, the method Tonga uses for frame buffer data is something novel. AMD says the compression is lossless, so it should have no impact on image quality, and "delta-based." Tonga's graphics core knows how to read and write data in this compressed format, and the compression happens transparently, without any special support from applications. We don't have many details on exactly how it works, but essentially, "delta-based" means the compression method keys on change. My best bet is that whenever a newly completed frame is written to memory, only the pixels whose color have changed from the frame prior are updated. ARM does something along those lines with its Mali mobile GPUs, and I expect AMD has taken a similar path. The payoff is astounding: AMD claims 40% higher memory bandwidth efficiency. I'm not quite sure what the basis of comparison is for that claim, nor am I clear on whether 40% is the best-case scenario or just the general case. But whatever; we can measure these things. 3DMark Vantage's color fill test has long been gated primarily by memory bandwidth, rather than the GPU's raw pixel fill rate. Here's how Tonga fares in it.

http://i503.photobucket.com/albums/e435/lanek66/3dm-color-fill_zps0494784c.gif http://i503.photobucket.com/albums/e435/lanek66/tm-x32_zpsff3a604c.gif There's more deep architecture reorganisation in Tonga compared to Hawaii, .. but They will be hard to figure untill AMD release the full list of them.

#4904668

H83

2014-09-02 17:08

I think this is an interesting card but they need do 2 things to sell it, double the VRAM and lower the price around 10%. I may even buy one of these if the prices are good in Portugal and if Nvidia´s new cards aren´t anything special.

#4904673

-Tj-

2014-09-02 17:12

That is some high pixel fillrate, my 780 has only 14.7 gpixels at stock or 15.8 @ 1228mhz.

#4904691

Lane

2014-09-02 17:48

I dont know for the driver, but as far as reviews goes, it is allways the case.. - Different games - Similar games, but different zone tested and different settings - Some do 3 bench and take the average one, some dont..

#4904742

chilly willy

2014-09-02 19:52

Don't forget people R9-285X is the replacement for the 280x. also this card performs better than the 280 while having a smaller bus width and therefore less vram, to compensate the memory is clocked a bit higher(and other arch changes). and the 285 also has the power consumption of about the 270x. 60 watts less for higher performance without a smaller manufacturing process is nothing to complain about.

#4904791

Slikar

2014-09-02 20:49

I wish they released these cards instead of 270x and 280x re-brands back then, this one is a fine piece but i'm never gonna upgrade for 10 fps more, that's dumb. Maybe for 285x if performance is at least 50% better than my current card.

#4904796

SLI-756

2014-09-02 20:58

i recently realized how incredibly valuable Hilbert's FLIR results in his reviews are, one of the most important (if not the most) pages of any guru gpu review is the FLIR results. some of the high end NVidia ram runs at 111C (so obviously a no go) 😀

#4904819

Corbus

2014-09-02 21:45

That is some high pixel fillrate, my 780 has only 14.7 gpixels at stock or 15.8 @ 1228mhz.

i think your 1228mhz overclock isn't stable, i have 16.91 at 1163mhz. and 16.17 at my stock (1124mhz)

#4904828

-Tj-

2014-09-02 21:59

i think your 1228mhz overclock isn't stable, i have 16.91 at 1163mhz. and 16.17 at my stock (1124mhz)

Its ram bandwidth limit, I had stock 3ghz in both cases. here is one with 300mhz oc @ 6.6ghz now I get 16.21 @ 1228mhz http://abload.de/thumb/ramoc7ustc.png