What a shame, I got an RX 480 two years ago and couldn't be happier with it, but even back then I noticed that many people didn't even consider AMD to be an option.
Top Job on the Analysis The one area where I dont often see mentioned is that when the Polaris prices did hit their rock bottom pricing of around £160 for an RX480 and £130 for an RX470 there were a lot of shops selling excess AMD Fury's for around the sub £200 mark. Even im guilty of giving out the advice as at the time you were seeing 10% Less Performance than a 1070 in most titles for essentially RX480/GTX1060 Money. As for the mining the only real downside is mindshare, I built a fair share of PCs using the RX470 when it hit its lowest price. As for the same price as the GTX1050Ti (£130) which was miles worse, and lacked Freesync (Which I find to be a real game changer overall). But since mining hit AMD Prices have yet to really return to a stable price, sure we get the odd sale down to £150 for some of the RX Cards, but usually the GTX Cards will often be the same price if not cheaper...Meaning those just end up selling better, still its good AMD Could profit out of it, as realistically at the end of the day they are a company. AMD Really needs to do something about mindshare, and Polaris could have been just that with its very promising low power consumption, but unfortunately that ship has sailed, and ill be suprised if the RX590 uses sub 200Watts like it should be capable of doing. All AMD Cards I have had (Bar the HD7770 which was flawless from the factory) needed an undervolt, my R9 285, My Fury, etc... The performance is always the same but I can shave a lot of my power consumption by changing a few numbers in Wattman. Their Vega chips continued this, and we've all seen how scalable they are. To this day Nvidia has handled their "Mistakes" better than when AMD has an issue, examples being the FX5000 Series which was followed up by the decent (albeit lackluster) 6000 Series, and Fermi, which was followed up with Fermi2 (Which is hands down one of the best aging architectures that isnt GCN), fixing peoples major gripes within one generation. Im not a fanboy for either company, but I do tend to buy AMD as its best for what I do, and when you consider how good and cheap Freesync is then the choice of a GPU when you have a budget in mind becomes vastly skewed. TL'DR: Polaris was good, AMD made some money, but it screwed with their brand image especially when paired with the poor Vega Launch.
that polaris launch was tainted by the boom of cryptomining at that time. We never saw that $200 price tag at least here in my country. More like $300 at the very least.
I proudly own an RX 580. I owned a GTX 660ti for 5 years and decided to switch to AMD due to the weak long-term driver support and performance of the 660ti. While at the time of release the 660ti was faster than the AMD competitors (7850 and 7870) the relative performance decreased over time. I even decided to pay a premium for the 580 over the 1060 as I purchased during the mining craze. My only complaint has been inconsistent free sync performance for my 144hz monitor at frame rates low in the range (48-60), but this is outweighed because I could actually afford a 144hz monitor. At the moment, I plan to continue purchasing AMD unless they become completely uncompetitive.
issaciams you mean regarding freesync? Very few games. I noticed the issue when testing free sync using a benchmark and have only noticed it in games like fallout 4 (though free sync remains an improvement). It’s really a non-issue, just was the one thing that caused me frustration since my purchase.
But the 660ti didn't compete with the 7850 and 7870, the Tahiti LE 7870 XT was the competitor. 7870 competed with the 660 and 7850 was up against the 650ti Boost.
@@instantkarma1978 Those were the cards within a similar price bracket, and in my research I looked at relative performance. You're right, though, which makes this comparison even more striking: 660ti: www.userbenchmark.com/PCGame/FPS-Estimates-The-Witcher-3--Wild-Hunt/3855/7683.0.0.0.0 Normal 7870: www.userbenchmark.com/PCGame/FPS-Estimates-The-Witcher-3--Wild-Hunt/3855/7714.0.0.0.0
I got an rx480 about 2 years ago just after it came out. I got the founders edition thinking it looked better for some reason but it's been doing me well so far. I paired it with a I7 6700k and have had some good success at gaming in 4k now!
I also got mine 1 year and a half ago to pair it with my A10 5800K. My bottleneck generator has been doing well so far. My gpu doesn't event get to 40% most of the time but still performing pretty nicely
A lot of benchmarks are set at unreasonable settings, making people think these cards aren't very capable today. Lowering settings is pretty underrated.
@@Pudgeee I have RX 560 non D and it's not that great. Sure I try to play at 1440p and should have bought at least 570. Still RX 560 did well for a while at 1440p. Now it's almost impossible to play anything on lowest at 1440p at all. I could play GTA 5 at 1440p medium-high settings, but now I can only play CoD WW2 at 1440p lowest settings (except AF and textures) with 45 fps and Far Cry 5 at 1440p needs near lowest settings and 0.7 resolution scaling to only get 40 fps stable. Meanwhile RX 570 or 580 does 1440p just fine. Can't comment on nVidia this gen, but after owning GTX 650 Ti and remembering how they gimped drivers (DOOM only ran at 640x480, lowest settings and sweet 35 fps. Sadly I can't even see that cinematic experience well) for it. I don't expect anything good out of 1050 or 1050 Ti in long term. If I only played at 1080p, then RX 560 would be much better card, but still sweet spot is 570 or 580, which are like 2 times faster for 30-50 percent increase in price.
@@MJ-uk6lu Well, why would you play at 1440p with a 560? It's a budget 1080 card (or lower), and anything above that is fairly unreasonable to expect good performance on.
@@Pudgeee Because my monitor is 1440p? Anyway I play mostly much older games and they run great at 1440p ultra settings. I really don't care about modern games and got it because I was worried that gtx 650 Ti won't handle UT2004 at max setting in 1440p.
@@MJ-uk6lu I just don't get what your point was when bringing up the fact that it can't play modern games at 1440p. If anyone were to play today's games on that resolution, they wouldn't rely on a 560. Older games are obviously entirely different.
@@dontuse10 it's as if every single game out there suddenly felt like shit, and no new release excites me any more, please sent help... :( as of this month I ve used my phone more than my triple monitor gaming computer next to me...
Same here. I had a 1050 TI, but i opted to sell it to get a AMD 5604G OC because of the drivers. (I got it on sale too, so even though there is a decent performance hit, it's still for me, a much better value alongside the open source drivers)
I'm not sure about significantly cheaper but I have seen a lot of RX 580s on sale for $300 recently. Though I got a 1060 6gb from msy in 2016 for the same price, but it was clearance stock
This is such an informative channel. I'm only recently getting into more technical pc hardware, but i feel like vids like these have pretty good starter videos on how the market and cards work. I really love listening to kliksphillip's voice too
The RX480 was really a good investement for me, I paired it with a Intel I5 6500, it worked beautifully until the Intel CPUs were nerfed after the discovery of Windows vulerability earlier this year, that caused a bottleneck on some games. It wasn't really behind the 1060, often being faster in some games, with 8GB of memory, I tought I could use it for VR in the case it took off.
Still love your CPU-GPU videos. They're very well researched and properly structured. Please keep making them if you have the time. Thanks a lot Phillip!
Philip IMPORTANT: Steam Statistics takes information from every PC worldwide PER ACCOUNT, meaning if you and your friend used the same PC with the same hardware, Steam would register the hardware twice. And some countries, especially China, is known for having PC Gaming Cafes, which usually have mid tier power efficient GPUs, meaning they have GTX 1060s and 1070s. Imagine hundreds of people logging into those PCs every day and Steam registering the hardware every single time on the very same PC, of course Nvidias power efficient cards would seem rather bloated.
ChinaSteam I'm not sure you understand how the Peoples Republic of China works. There are very few chinese people who dare fuck with anything western so they have their own clients and games specially made for internet caffees
for me the main benefit of amd over nvidia is freesync. two seemingly identical cards from amd and nvidia in reality will be very different price wise, if the user decides to buy a good monitor for the card. basically any decent monitor these days will have freesync, but if you want adaptive sync on nvidia you will need to shell out a few hundred more. It's for this reason that i bought a vega 56, even when an equivalent nvidia card may have been slightly cheaper.
Speed (faster is better) - ofc Power consumption - ???? Size (smaller is better) - ok Process (smaller is better) - i trust you Price (lower is better) - *spits coffee*
Lower power consumption is always better when talking about similar cards. A smaller process is always better no matter what. A lower price is always better when talking about similar cards.
Everybody knows that people only buy graphics cards in order to enlarge their virtual penis. If you don't have the most expensive card with ray tracing cores, hyper-threaded anti-aliasing processors and quantum field chronometers, there's really no reason to even consider playing Fortnite.
After getting thoroughly hooked on researching computer specs over the last month, it's awesome timing for you to release a GPU hindsight video. Helps me to validate what I have learned. :D
I'm optimistic about Navi. Not only are AMD in a much better position as a company than when they released Polaris (thanks to Ryzen being a big hit) which should mean more R&D resources, but they're going to be on TSMC now which has been an advantage for Nvidia for a long time. Regarding the 480, I think it was the 1060 that really took the wind out of its sails. However I think those Steam figures are misleading. The 1060 definitely sold better than the 480 but not THAT much better. Internet cafes in Asia inflate those 1060 steam figures significantly.
@@2kliksphilip Of course, it's still relevant information because it does actually reflect how many people are USING nvidia hardware instead of polaris. Those figures will influence what hardware game developers are going to optimise for.
RX 480's are actually pulling ahead of GTX 1060 6GB's in a lot of newer games now, though it varies a bit depending on the specs of the exact models being compared
12:17 Glanced at my screen as this table popped up and did a double take. Looking at the first AMD entry, the first thing I thought was "How many people have AMD cards in crossfire??"
Thanks Philip. As someone who liked hardware I got very familiar with NVIDIA's lineup of GPUs. I never new the naming schemes for the AMD side. This video is great at explaining the names and positioning.
The claim of the RX 480 being "available for $200" was a major sticking point early on. That referred to a hypothetical 4GB model that then didn't really exist. What AMD ended up doing was halving the VRAM of 8 GB cards in BIOS and selling very few of them at $199 to fulfill the advertising obligation. The RX 480 was overpriced and short in supply for months after launch, and it was likely due to an Ethereum boom precursor that hit in 2016 before it became mainstream in 2017. Nvidia's 10-series were also more expensive than MSRP but availability was higher.
VR is taking off but slowly. It's not gonna go away it's just too damn good. Once the price of vr headsets drops it will explode because they are the most immersive and fun thing I have ever experienced.
I thought I remember a good part of the power and efficiency problem for Polaris and Vega was using Global Foundries' 14nm. TSMC's 16nm IIRC is superior by a fairly good margin.
The 7970 did prove faster than the 680 and the 7970 GHz was faster, full stop, even at the time. Now it is a pure victory. The 290X competed with the 780 Ti which used similar power and was similar performance, but aged worse (fact) and was much bigger (fact). Hawaii was the last time AMD rekt Nvidia fully, not the 4000 nor 5000 nor 6000 series. It was the 290X.
I was one of the idiots who went with a gtx 770 (same chip as 680) instead of a 290 because of 'power and heat' considerations, despite getting a pretty hot and noisy windforce 3x not much different than the sapphire 290 I was looking at.
But the Hawaii cards got a bad reputation because of the shitty coolers. As much as I like AMD/ATI they've always failed on customer experience. Then mining blew it for AMD.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946You're completely wrong about mining. It's been a saving grace for RTG and is what funds what comes after Navi. Gaming is no longer the #1 highest profit market for GPUs, there's a lot of other uses for them nowadays.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946The sapphire triple x cooler for the 290 was better or on par with what I had on a similarly priced gtx 770, I had just bitten the marketing trap and fell for it.
I bought a PC with the GTX 1070 over the 480 in early 2017. It was a while ago but from memory the deciders for me (at the time I wasn't as well read in hardware) were firstly the price difference in Australia wasn't as competitive for AMD. The 1070 had, and still has, an excellent reputation. My primary goal was to build a VR machine and while I didn't put too much stock in driver debates, fans on both sides were pretty adamant nvidia was the way to go for that. Finally because nvidia has the biggest market share, it's a lot easier to get an array of user reviews. Something I put less stock in now, but for a budding enthusiast, that was important to me then. I believe at the time the R9 Fury and the 390 were also competing in price. While it was clear where the 980 vs 1070 were generation-wise, AMD had some obfuscation for that particular area. The GTX 1070 was an excellent choice, and I don't regret it, what I do regret but only in hindsight was not getting a Ryzen CPU, but even then I probably would have got a cheap motherboard that couldn't have upgraded to the end of AM4 generation chips.
Great video except at the use of the steam hardware survey at 12:30 ish. The problem with using this data is that it fails to mention that the immense popularity of nvidia's cards is due to the Asian market and their majority usage of PC Bangs and Internet Cafes, most of which are either directly sponsored by Nvidia or get subsidies from Nvidia to use their cards in their PCs. This causes a massive artificial influx of nvidia cards in the steam hardware survey as many of those users have not actually bought a nvidia or an AMD card at all, they just use them. The average person building a gaming PC, especially in the west probably has a much higher chance of having an AMD card in their system.
It is going to be incredibly difficult for AMD to make a major comeback. There are a lot of reasons to take Nvidia over AMD right now, and it has been that way for quite a long time now. The sad thing is without real competition Nvidia card prices are going way up.
If there's any time for a comeback to be made, it's now. The RTX launch is leaving people with a lot of sour tastes in their mouths (regardless of NVidia's motivation behind it) and AMD's likely going to announce their 7nm architecture's GPUs in January. Still not very likely - Nvidia would probably have to bungle several launches in a row to waste the mindshare they have in the consumer market - but AMD might be able to make a dent in things if the stars align. They managed to give Intel a hell of a wake-up call with Zen last year, after all.
@@Jordan-rNvgQ umm... i'm prty sure you can find something similar or better then ULMB... as for the most used reason by nvidia users "emulation" when ONLY cemu have this problem.... and the rest works fine as for the connectivity... different AIB can have different connection also converters for old monitors those are not reasons to but one over the other when it is a bit to... how to put it... you might find it on both with bit of research and i don't think someone would buy a gtx 1080TI/2080TI or a vega56/64 strictly for emulation... what i'm trying to say is that i don't find your reasons "strong reasons" to not buy one over the other tho...
I had an R9 390 and quite liked that card, it just felt powerful... But was also running hot and thus a bit too loud for my taste. I - sadly - got dragged into the mining "business" by a friend, and when things started going off the rails I sold my 390 and replaced it with an RX 580 that I previously used for mining. It felt like the exact same card, but with a much more silent design. I quite liked it but it really didn't feel like an improvement in terms of performance, so I soon ditched it for another card from the depths of Ethereum mines: a Vega 56. That really was an improvement in the performance department, and quite liked how fast games ran with it... at the rare times where I could actually hear them. Man, was that card loud! At that point I ran out of options, I wanted something that's faster than a Polaris, but is still silent. For the first time in my life I decided to go with nVidia instead, and bought a 1070 Ti. In terms of efficiency this card was a huge improvement, it's a little bit f aster than the Vega 56 was, and is really silent. And I hate it. Through all the years while I was using AMD cards I was always being told how their drivers suck donkey balls, and all that. You know what? There ISN'T A SINGLE DRIVER for my nVidia card that works well with all my games. Some driver versions cause stuttering in X games, other drivers make Y games stutter, it's ridiculous. And G-Sync, what a worthless piece of... You pay quite a lot for it, and then it works properly with like... 10% of the games currently on the market, at best? Thanks to all my issues I became a regular visitor on the nVidia forums as well, and all the ignorance going on there is mind blowing. nVidia refuses to fix issues, they just concentrate on marketing their new products and selling new stuff... Once they got their claw in you, once you've already gave your money to them, you're no longer important, you're just a problem, not a respected customer. I can totally understand all the people here rooting for AMD, the very first day Navi comes out I'll be back on the red team! nVidia is like the Apple of PC hardwares, looks tasty, smells good, the sugar coat is perfect, the price is high too, so it MUST be good, right? right?! Then you take the first bite, and meeehhhh, crap.
Had a 480 since launch. Loved it. Did great and even made a bit off mining it. Ended up selling it to a friend who was using a gtx660 for cheap and buying a used 1080 when the prices fell Bellow 350$ (got mine for 325$).
I had/have/used to use, a 290x with the three fans, that thing was like a jet engine in volume. I upgraded to a 1080 now and its a good 2-3 times quieter, not to mention the performance hike.
Personally, as an inspiring content creator, I don't think I would've have ever bought AMD back then, no matter what. As you said, they lacked an equivalent to shadowplay back then, and to be fair, kind of still do. Sure they have relive or whatever, but they don't have NVENC, which is supported by OBS, and a handful of other programs. They also don't really have an equivalent to CUDA that's as supported as it. That makes Nvidia far more appealing for people doing any kind of 3D work, and much more. The same will go for the RTX series, being great for professionals doing work with ray tracing and AI. Back then AMD was also at a super low point due to CPUs aswell, Ryzen not being out yet iirc. AMD was not very competitive in CPUs, so people often went Intel/Nvidia instead of AMD. Another issue was marketing VR. Although it's nice in theory to have VR for $200, and it's achievable at a low price point, it's appeal still mainly lies in enthusiasts, especially back then. This means that people who's price point was $200, didn't really care about VR. VR headsets were still very expensive, and so were there limited games. People who could justify getting into VR at the time, were usually the same people who were able to justify purchasing something far better, like a 1070 and 1080. We are also starting to get more "less knowledgeable" people into the gaming scene, who just want what everyone else is using, which usually is Intel/Nvidia, as that's what all the content creators, or high end gaming rigs use. People don't really care that much about looking into price/performance like they used to in the past, or atleast the people I talk to don't anymore. Sometimes people just want the most expensive thing for whatever reason, look at smartphones. That's personally why I think AMD failed during this launch and why I believe AMD need to start focusing on the content creator, like they did with Ryzen, for their GPUs, as Nvidia's feature set kinda blows AMD away.
@@3kliksphilip They do now, but it's not widely supported like NVENC is. I'm also not aware of which cards specifically support it. Thanks for reply btw, ily. Last time I got a reply is when youtube had direct messages and I sent you a shitty map I made when I was 13
the hardware h264 encoder on polaris has been supported fine on OBS, use it on my rx480 all the time, and have been doing so for a while now. in them early polaris days you actually needed this bad boy: obsproject.com/forum/resources/amd-advanced-media-framework-encoder-plugin-for-obs-studio.427/ yeah, nvidia was 3-4 years ahead with shadowplay, so naturally their nvenc got baseline implemented way sooner, but, please don't make up nonsense about OBS and support for AMD hardware. :) in fact , i HAD to use OBS on my gtx 760 for hardware capturing, as the nvidia software did not not let me use shadowplay, it wanted me to have a 770 or higher, despite having the NVENC hardware, which meant i couldn't use it for ages until the software came along. but yeah, totally agree on the cuda and industry thing (and rtx), they have that shit on lockdown, introducing alternatives for it, that aren't 1:1 compatible is useless at this point. i actually remember RTG making some kind of program to convert cuda code into code a radeon could crunch, but never really heard much from that, i don't even remember what it's called anymore... but yeah, that shit was only useful for converting standalone sciency cuda stuff anyway, does nothing for 3d programs that need to natively support directly hooking into the hardware. the alternative, opencl, still seems to have trouble taking off. luckily, my 3d program of choice is blender, which is one of the exceptions that does have half-decent opencl support these days (even CPU+GPU rendering)
@@elikay2101 mhm do you know blender? a vega 64 renders any scene faster than a gtx 1080ti and now with amds pro renderer its even faster. AMD form of ray tracing was available for a long time known as "FireRays". For AI a vega card would be a no brainer against a GTX 1080ti considering it beats it in almost every scientific workload. BTW what are you creating?
"but they don't have NVENC, which is supported by OBS" the hardware level encoding was present since their first gen architecture GCN 1.0 (i think it includes 7k series not sure) as philip said it's called VCE and could be used in OBS, i personally used to record 1080p 30fps 20k bitrate on a mid-range r9 270x, the more mid range r7 260x had GCN 1.1 (or 1.2 dont remember for sure) and they improved to support 1080p 60fps at the same bitrate... usually people don't do proper research then say "oh this didn't had that or that or that"
Hey, so the reason why I got a 1050 Ti was that it was on sale for ~$100 US . AMD's closest offering (the 460) was listed at ~$130 at the time. It was just a better deal for me.
@i Draw Generally you don't actually use mining as your sole source of income; some people that are willing to invest insane amounts of money do but mostly it's a mostly-passive form of income. The ROI can be 8 months or more. When you do hit break-even, though, it can be an extra few hundred dollars a month (depending on where you live). People also tend to eventually resell their cards to get more of that money back faster. Also the biggest cause of the shortages was actually the big groups that would buy hundreds or more of the cards at a time. Not the people who would buy 10 or so. Especially people like this who probably bought used cards.
I was considering an AMD card for a future build due to FreeSync and better performance in some games I play. But given the hardware survey, I am a bit skeptical about it now. I have been pretty dependent on ShadowPlay on my current system, and I have an impression that ReLive is not as good. With their dev leadership gone, I hope they still manage to succeed in their next launch, which should be soon according to their roadmap. Given the poor behaviour by Nvidia at the moment, we really need some good ol competition once again.
I haven't kept up to date, but a few months after ReLive came, benchmarkers/testers claimed it had better video quality and had less performance impact than Shadowplay.
I haven't used shadowplay (althought I guess I could test it), but as far as I can tell from the settings, relive is superior in most ways, having options for both AVC and HEVC, audio quality and a few extras for livestreaming
Yup even my friend gone with 1050Ti instead of RX500 series. Gone with Intel Pentium G series instead of Ryzen 2200G that have the same freaking $price (Yes we are from Malaysia). I can’t brain this brand loyalty thing and also due to past reputation. Past reputation makes people stick with iPhones instead of more versatile and as powerful Androids like the latest Samsung Note ( 3/4th of a price in my country), Oneplus (fraction of a price), Pixel (almost the same price but with far better user experience and cloud service etc. This confirmed by my friend who’s a loyal iPhone fan since 3GS era up until the X (or Ten whatever you wanna call it) era he never once switch to other brand and also by a lots of reviewers out there) and many more.
I've been using a used 760Ti for like 2 years and it's been a great little card for £70 I paid on ebay but had to upgrade for newer games in late 2018. Looking at Nvidia's ridiculous pricing I chose to switch to AMD. Got an RX 580 Nitro for £170! Closest to this from the Nvidia camp was the crappy 3GB 1060 and that was at around £200 and more like an RX 570. That was an amazing purchase. Zipping through Forza Horizon 4 on Ultra at 60FPS is what I needed and at that price it was a no brainer. Nvidia is high if they think they can be the Apple of GPUs and constantly raise their prices like this.
something to add is that perhaps there is more prebuilds been sold with nvidia than amd, and because of that people that are buying prebuilds more than likely will see a pc with an nvidia gpu compared to an amd gpu.
I like to think the cryptomining boom hurt AMD a good bit since the price/performance ratio that they had as lost. I remember saving for a Vega 56 only to get suddenly shut out because the price had jumped so high. At that point I just bought a used 980 Ti and somehow managed to exchange that for a GTX 1080. I still want a Vega though.
@@3kliksphilipThe comment i made wasn't made well, I men't to say is that I wish i knew more about computers are the history of companies and products. I don't really know much history about computer tech, (all i really know is that a 1080ti is good) but its mainly all the acronyms and numbers. Don't worry the way you presented the information was great, I liked how you actually correlated the facts and statistic to what they men't. Sorry if the comment was a bit provocative, great video as always.
One important thing: These Graphic Cards were not used for mining Bitcoin, the mining of bitcoin is nowadays only done using ASIC miners. The different miners were all mining other currencies that are somewhat resistant to ASIC mining.
@12:30 The reason you see such a disparity in Polaris vs Pascal at the 1060 and below is because blockchain pretty much priced all of the AMD gpus out of consumer hands. The Pascal pricing didn't start inflating too bad until a RX480 started costing $400.
I've been using an AMD RX 470 for about 3 years now and I've never looked back. This little thing runs like a dream and my friend is inheriting it from me once the next good AMD GPU comes out. Could be the RX 590, who knows.....
Excellent analysis, I think you understated the problem of miners buying up Polaris and how this shows up in what people actually game with. If you look at AMD figures their market share should be much larger than what shows up in something like steam hardware survey. AMD had millions of polaris GPUs going out the factory door per month that just aren't out there being used for gaming. Ex-mining AMD cards are indeed flooding the second hand market right now. Interestingly miners would undervolt and underclock Polaris cards and keep them well cooled and usually less dust clogged than a gamers card (Difference between garage vs someones dusty bedroom I guess), so the cards hitting the market are hardly burned out at all and probably should have a long life ahead. Gamers just aren't into buying second hand stuff, but I wonder if that habit will change now, and how will that shape the market for a while.
AMD's market share in Steam statistics might be very low but cryptocurrency miners bought a TON of these cards. Also, they supply CPU and GPUs for both PS4 and Xbox One. Their Ryzen CPU's compete very well with Intel in every price point. Hopefully they'll be able to compete again with Nvidia in consumer GPU's in near future.
Cards that were used for mining tend to be MORE reliable, not less, than other used GPUs (assuming the seller is reputable). They are typically undervolted while mining, and the fact that they are run 24/7 means there should be no defects and will continue to run for the foreseeable future.
I am very happy with my Polaris-based card, that is sold under the "RX Vega" brand, inside an Intel CPU. And by "happy" I mean confused.But also happy that Intel and AMD can get along to do that. Seriously, it's a thing that exists!
I live in Brazil and at least before the crypto boom, the RX 480 was a awsome card price-wise, I bought mine for R$200 less, the model I've choose was the Gaming X from MSI for R$1200, I got a overclockeble card that runs pretty cold, better than paying R$1400 for a basic 3GB 1060 mini from Zotac.
I remember a couple years ago I was on the RX 480 train. Bought two of them was tried to OC them but this is where I learned backing off voltage on these cards would actually increase performance easily since AMD's set voltage was so high for the powerlimit that clock speeds suffered. VRMs weren't that great either if you had them running at full power (the reference cooler) so I water blocked them. Ended up selling that PC did a build with Vega 56, I'm loving this card.
As someone who pre ordered an rx460 and had one since it came out to until very recently I think Polaris is good, the card was strong enough to run everything I needed it to and it was really cheap(about 120$).
Miners bought Polaris cards en masse, I haven't seen them in stock at MSRP until recently in Finland. And before the craze they weren't stocked. It was AMD on back order or Nvidia immediately.
I just bought a MSI RX 570 8GB card, a bit late but thanks to Freesync support it is still a very capable FullHD card and the price was really great (155 EUR). I was surprised though that I could undervolt it massively (1.15V -> 925 mV) to keep it cool at 65°C, powerful at 1286/1950 MHz and quite all at the same time. It consumes just below 90 W in Battlefield 1 with a 48-72 Hz FreeSync monitor. Very remarkable indeed. The default values are awful in comparison though. What a shame that only now at the end of its shelf live, some more gamers get to appreciate so much value at its intended price range.
As a RX480 owner. I'm running games in 4K/60fps In many games. Gears Of War 4, Forza Horizon 4, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc with my I7 6700K CPU at Very High/Ultra Settings. For those games that dont, I drop to 3200X1800 at medium/high settings and get 60fps. Destiny 2, Tomb Raider, Battlefield 1 & 4. Not bad for a $199 card.
4000 series was amazing. People still bought the 200 series in droves. They where happy when the price dropped to compete with ATI... even when the 4000 series was still a massively better deal. No matter how good ATI cards where - nobody bought them.
Polaris was solid, but I'm interested in what's next. nVidia has gone crazy with their prices and it seems like we no longer have a great 970-like deal for midrange consumers.
Both are a great deal. German pricing is atm 200€ for Rx 580 and 220€ for gtx 1060. Rx cards have assasins creed in the pack (key about 40€) so if you dont need it and sell it you would have pay around 160€ ...cant be any cheaper.
I had a 480, a asus dual 4gb model. Fantastically good card. I’ve upgraded to Vega now for rendering. But i will always stay with amd. I’ll likely have this card for a while.
8:14 some people were disappointed in the 400 series because they performed at 970 levels at launch and the fact that you could get a used or new old stock 980(5-20% faster at launch depending on game) at the release of Polaris for $200. If you didn't mind going used, you skipped Polaris honestly. I always compare new and old products because computer hardware ages amazingly compared to other consumer products.
Oh I had the R9 290! Yeah that was a very loud one. It was soo loud that, my family that was in other room were asking me why do I have kitchen mixer put into my PC. Little did they know it was a GPU with fans put to 30% of their speed... I hope I'll never stumble upon such loud piece of hardware. I instantly sold it. I forgot to mention one little detail. It was overheating with the max fan speed, reaching over 110℃ in just Battlefield 3.
Back when these cards released I was set to buy an upgrade for my 960, I ended up with a 1060 because the AMD card just weren't available from reputable retailers in my country and resellers on the equivalent of ebay would overprice the card by 50% even before crypto took the stage. Even now the local amazon only lists a single vega 64 and 2 vega 56 for sale. AMD MUST improve availability for Navi if they want to sell more.
I eventually settled on the Nvidia 1060 over the Radeon because I was using an Nvidia 680 before - and was getting into the Nvidia "Gamestream" system to stream games to other devices via the network in my home. Back then I was only dabbling with this, but today I don't think I could buy a AMD card anymore unless they come up with a System like this on their own. Steam Play is good, but a lot more lossy than GameStream, performance wise. So it's not really brand loyalty. More... Needed functionality.
Bear in mind, Mr kliksphillip, that pre built PCs, here in the UK, mainly use nvidia's GPUs only. This would account for a large percentage of users; the casuals who spend too much money so someone else builds their tower. It's a shame, but my friend bought a 1060, only because there was no 470 available.
When I was building my PC, Polaris was simply not an option for me. The mining craze was at its highest, and getting a Polaris card would cost be double the price of a 1050 Ti (the card I got). If I was building a PC right now, I'd probably go with AMD (although they're a bit more expensive where I live).
What a shame, I got an RX 480 two years ago and couldn't be happier with it, but even back then I noticed that many people didn't even consider AMD to be an option.
they buying nvidia and blame amd for no reason, freesync everywhere but 1060 better choice for they...
Yeah my 480 can play pretty much anything on max settings
how many tries did that hellalalalot take?
yes.
It took a hellalalalot of takes.
1:56
100000000
Top Job on the Analysis
The one area where I dont often see mentioned is that when the Polaris prices did hit their rock bottom pricing of around £160 for an RX480 and £130 for an RX470 there were a lot of shops selling excess AMD Fury's for around the sub £200 mark. Even im guilty of giving out the advice as at the time you were seeing 10% Less Performance than a 1070 in most titles for essentially RX480/GTX1060 Money. As for the mining the only real downside is mindshare, I built a fair share of PCs using the RX470 when it hit its lowest price. As for the same price as the GTX1050Ti (£130) which was miles worse, and lacked Freesync (Which I find to be a real game changer overall). But since mining hit AMD Prices have yet to really return to a stable price, sure we get the odd sale down to £150 for some of the RX Cards, but usually the GTX Cards will often be the same price if not cheaper...Meaning those just end up selling better, still its good AMD Could profit out of it, as realistically at the end of the day they are a company.
AMD Really needs to do something about mindshare, and Polaris could have been just that with its very promising low power consumption, but unfortunately that ship has sailed, and ill be suprised if the RX590 uses sub 200Watts like it should be capable of doing. All AMD Cards I have had (Bar the HD7770 which was flawless from the factory) needed an undervolt, my R9 285, My Fury, etc... The performance is always the same but I can shave a lot of my power consumption by changing a few numbers in Wattman. Their Vega chips continued this, and we've all seen how scalable they are.
To this day Nvidia has handled their "Mistakes" better than when AMD has an issue, examples being the FX5000 Series which was followed up by the decent (albeit lackluster) 6000 Series, and Fermi, which was followed up with Fermi2 (Which is hands down one of the best aging architectures that isnt GCN), fixing peoples major gripes within one generation. Im not a fanboy for either company, but I do tend to buy AMD as its best for what I do, and when you consider how good and cheap Freesync is then the choice of a GPU when you have a budget in mind becomes vastly skewed.
TL'DR: Polaris was good, AMD made some money, but it screwed with their brand image especially when paired with the poor Vega Launch.
Freesync is a snac
that polaris launch was tainted by the boom of cryptomining at that time. We never saw that $200 price tag at least here in my country. More like $300 at the very least.
Love your videos, good to see you here
Also where were you finding such cheap rx480s I looked and all were £240 when I was buying my pc( ended up getting a 1060)
@@Ben-ew3hv: Amazon and eBuyer. I was really tempted by them but went for a Fury Myself.
I proudly own an RX 580. I owned a GTX 660ti for 5 years and decided to switch to AMD due to the weak long-term driver support and performance of the 660ti. While at the time of release the 660ti was faster than the AMD competitors (7850 and 7870) the relative performance decreased over time. I even decided to pay a premium for the 580 over the 1060 as I purchased during the mining craze. My only complaint has been inconsistent free sync performance for my 144hz monitor at frame rates low in the range (48-60), but this is outweighed because I could actually afford a 144hz monitor. At the moment, I plan to continue purchasing AMD unless they become completely uncompetitive.
What games and settings are you getting such low fps in? Are you always using ultra settings or something?
issaciams you mean regarding freesync? Very few games. I noticed the issue when testing free sync using a benchmark and have only noticed it in games like fallout 4 (though free sync remains an improvement). It’s really a non-issue, just was the one thing that caused me frustration since my purchase.
But the 660ti didn't compete with the 7850 and 7870, the Tahiti LE 7870 XT was the competitor. 7870 competed with the 660 and 7850 was up against the 650ti Boost.
@@instantkarma1978 Those were the cards within a similar price bracket, and in my research I looked at relative performance. You're right, though, which makes this comparison even more striking:
660ti: www.userbenchmark.com/PCGame/FPS-Estimates-The-Witcher-3--Wild-Hunt/3855/7683.0.0.0.0
Normal 7870: www.userbenchmark.com/PCGame/FPS-Estimates-The-Witcher-3--Wild-Hunt/3855/7714.0.0.0.0
5 years out of a 660Ti! :o
A great
M id range
D eal
damn
Try to say this towards Ryzen CPUs.
AMRD
ayy
A ncient
M idget
D ick
You've been on fire recently with the vids Phil. Great Job!
Member when high end PC was
Back in the day a computer could cost more than a couple of brand new cars.
I member
I don't remember because that was never true. There's something called inflation.
Ryzen 7 1700 x370 16 GB ddr4 gtx 1070 Ti 500gb SSD
what are you talking about? right now you can build a 1440p PC with ryzen 2600 and GTX 1070Ti for 1000$...
I got an rx480 about 2 years ago just after it came out. I got the founders edition thinking it looked better for some reason but it's been doing me well so far. I paired it with a I7 6700k and have had some good success at gaming in 4k now!
Polaris really isn't bad. For the money, it gives quite a punch.
Despondent perfect for me. I mainly play csgo and some light 3D modelling so it’s perfect. I was going to fork out for a 1070 but tbh this is perfect
I've got the same cpu+GPU :)
@@elfoxy1997 Aw nice! U play many games on them?
I also got mine 1 year and a half ago to pair it with my A10 5800K. My bottleneck generator has been doing well so far. My gpu doesn't event get to 40% most of the time but still performing pretty nicely
I'm currently using a kinda obscure 4GB RX560D, which is a rehashed 460. I'm very happy with it and am surprised at how powerful it actually is.
A lot of benchmarks are set at unreasonable settings, making people think these cards aren't very capable today. Lowering settings is pretty underrated.
@@Pudgeee I have RX 560 non D and it's not that great. Sure I try to play at 1440p and should have bought at least 570. Still RX 560 did well for a while at 1440p. Now it's almost impossible to play anything on lowest at 1440p at all. I could play GTA 5 at 1440p medium-high settings, but now I can only play CoD WW2 at 1440p lowest settings (except AF and textures) with 45 fps and Far Cry 5 at 1440p needs near lowest settings and 0.7 resolution scaling to only get 40 fps stable. Meanwhile RX 570 or 580 does 1440p just fine. Can't comment on nVidia this gen, but after owning GTX 650 Ti and remembering how they gimped drivers (DOOM only ran at 640x480, lowest settings and sweet 35 fps. Sadly I can't even see that cinematic experience well) for it. I don't expect anything good out of 1050 or 1050 Ti in long term. If I only played at 1080p, then RX 560 would be much better card, but still sweet spot is 570 or 580, which are like 2 times faster for 30-50 percent increase in price.
@@MJ-uk6lu Well, why would you play at 1440p with a 560? It's a budget 1080 card (or lower), and anything above that is fairly unreasonable to expect good performance on.
@@Pudgeee Because my monitor is 1440p? Anyway I play mostly much older games and they run great at 1440p ultra settings. I really don't care about modern games and got it because I was worried that gtx 650 Ti won't handle UT2004 at max setting in 1440p.
@@MJ-uk6lu I just don't get what your point was when bringing up the fact that it can't play modern games at 1440p. If anyone were to play today's games on that resolution, they wouldn't rely on a 560. Older games are obviously entirely different.
EIGHTEEN MINUTES of Philip-y goodness. We don't deserve this.
1:55 cracks me up every time xD
i couldn't care less about gpu's, but for some reason i can't help but watch everything that this guy makes. love you philip
@i Draw Ikr not as if its needed for a game
@@dontuse10 guys since I subbed to this guy I stopped playing games :/
@@dontuse10 it's as if every single game out there suddenly felt like shit, and no new release excites me any more, please sent help... :(
as of this month I ve used my phone more than my triple monitor gaming computer next to me...
HOW DARE YOU NOT CARE ABOUT GPUS
i put this comment here to show how this guy can make something that doesn't interest me very entertaining, chill
I very much enjoyed your perspective on this subject, recognizing that there can be a difference between technical success and financial success.
AMD has much better open-source drivers than Nvidia. That's why I chose an AMD GPU.
Same here. I had a 1050 TI, but i opted to sell it to get a AMD 5604G OC because of the drivers. (I got it on sale too, so even though there is a decent performance hit, it's still for me, a much better value alongside the open source drivers)
I bet you gain so much fps from them being open source
@@2911oscar Controversial Opinion, I know, but: There's more to buying a graphics card than just FPS numbers
@@2911oscarfor some people there are more important things then 5 fps, like company integrity for one :)
Linux user? If yes: high five
In Australia, AMD cards are significantly cheaper than the NVidea cards... yet.. there always seems to be many more NVidea cards.
I'm not sure about significantly cheaper but I have seen a lot of RX 580s on sale for $300 recently. Though I got a 1060 6gb from msy in 2016 for the same price, but it was clearance stock
The 480 for 200 was honestly such a steal, especially looking at prices today for new GPUs
This is such an informative channel. I'm only recently getting into more technical pc hardware, but i feel like vids like these have pretty good starter videos on how the market and cards work. I really love listening to kliksphillip's voice too
The RX480 was really a good investement for me, I paired it with a Intel I5 6500, it worked beautifully until the Intel CPUs were nerfed after the discovery of Windows vulerability earlier this year, that caused a bottleneck on some games.
It wasn't really behind the 1060, often being faster in some games, with 8GB of memory, I tought I could use it for VR in the case it took off.
Still love your CPU-GPU videos. They're very well researched and properly structured. Please keep making them if you have the time. Thanks a lot Phillip!
Philip IMPORTANT:
Steam Statistics takes information from every PC worldwide PER ACCOUNT, meaning if you and your friend used the same PC with the same hardware, Steam would register the hardware twice.
And some countries, especially China, is known for having PC Gaming Cafes, which usually have mid tier power efficient GPUs, meaning they have GTX 1060s and 1070s.
Imagine hundreds of people logging into those PCs every day and Steam registering the hardware every single time on the very same PC, of course Nvidias power efficient cards would seem rather bloated.
ChinaSteam
I'm not sure you understand how the Peoples Republic of China works. There are very few chinese people who dare fuck with anything western so they have their own clients and games specially made for internet caffees
That doesn't explain the 1050 Ti and 1050.
There is absolutely no way the number is inflated to that degree. It is well known Nvidia has a massive market share lead over AMD.
They fixed that in May.
It doesn't matter. Nvidia is so far ahead that even this doesn't make any difference at all.
hearing half life music over in the background makes these videos so much warmer to watch, like they are closer to heart
for me the main benefit of amd over nvidia is freesync. two seemingly identical cards from amd and nvidia in reality will be very different price wise, if the user decides to buy a good monitor for the card. basically any decent monitor these days will have freesync, but if you want adaptive sync on nvidia you will need to shell out a few hundred more. It's for this reason that i bought a vega 56, even when an equivalent nvidia card may have been slightly cheaper.
Im glad to see you uploading something i love the most in my life.
Speed (faster is better) - ofc
Power consumption - ????
Size (smaller is better) - ok
Process (smaller is better) - i trust you
Price (lower is better) - *spits coffee*
206ish lower is better if you're poor
Lower power consumption is always better when talking about similar cards. A smaller process is always better no matter what. A lower price is always better when talking about similar cards.
3kliksphilip oh sheit Its really him. You done now
NVIDIA CORP FAKE ACCOUNT SHILL FOUND. NICE TRY PUBLIC AGENT.
Everybody knows that people only buy graphics cards in order to enlarge their virtual penis. If you don't have the most expensive card with ray tracing cores, hyper-threaded anti-aliasing processors and quantum field chronometers, there's really no reason to even consider playing Fortnite.
Im proud Philipp. Meantioning AdoredTV is always cool.
470 and 570 cost same as 1050ti now cheaper than 1050ti , 580 faster than 1060 and cheaper .
Not faster than 1060. Well, 1% or 2% better, alright, but it's so small we can consider them equal.
After getting thoroughly hooked on researching computer specs over the last month, it's awesome timing for you to release a GPU hindsight video. Helps me to validate what I have learned. :D
I'm optimistic about Navi. Not only are AMD in a much better position as a company than when they released Polaris (thanks to Ryzen being a big hit) which should mean more R&D resources, but they're going to be on TSMC now which has been an advantage for Nvidia for a long time.
Regarding the 480, I think it was the 1060 that really took the wind out of its sails. However I think those Steam figures are misleading. The 1060 definitely sold better than the 480 but not THAT much better. Internet cafes in Asia inflate those 1060 steam figures significantly.
@@2kliksphilip Of course, it's still relevant information because it does actually reflect how many people are USING nvidia hardware instead of polaris. Those figures will influence what hardware game developers are going to optimise for.
RX 480's are actually pulling ahead of GTX 1060 6GB's in a lot of newer games now, though it varies a bit depending on the specs of the exact models being compared
0:28
But first, we need to go V A C a decade
V A C V A C V A C
To be honest, I know next to nothing about this subject. But the way you present makes the video really interesting! Watched the whole 18.28
12:17 Glanced at my screen as this table popped up and did a double take. Looking at the first AMD entry, the first thing I thought was "How many people have AMD cards in crossfire??"
@@2kliksphilip ayy 2 way crossfire here
@@2kliksphilip Pfffttt, that ain't nothing! I got 470,480,570,580x10-12 crossfire ayyy
I have an amd rx 580 so yeet
RX 570 here :D
Thanks Philip. As someone who liked hardware I got very familiar with NVIDIA's lineup of GPUs. I never new the naming schemes for the AMD side. This video is great at explaining the names and positioning.
The claim of the RX 480 being "available for $200" was a major sticking point early on. That referred to a hypothetical 4GB model that then didn't really exist. What AMD ended up doing was halving the VRAM of 8 GB cards in BIOS and selling very few of them at $199 to fulfill the advertising obligation. The RX 480 was overpriced and short in supply for months after launch, and it was likely due to an Ethereum boom precursor that hit in 2016 before it became mainstream in 2017. Nvidia's 10-series were also more expensive than MSRP but availability was higher.
VR is taking off but slowly. It's not gonna go away it's just too damn good. Once
the price of vr headsets drops it will explode because they are the most immersive and fun thing I have ever experienced.
you are one of the best youtubers.
I thought I remember a good part of the power and efficiency problem for Polaris and Vega was using Global Foundries' 14nm. TSMC's 16nm IIRC is superior by a fairly good margin.
The 7970 did prove faster than the 680 and the 7970 GHz was faster, full stop, even at the time. Now it is a pure victory. The 290X competed with the 780 Ti which used similar power and was similar performance, but aged worse (fact) and was much bigger (fact). Hawaii was the last time AMD rekt Nvidia fully, not the 4000 nor 5000 nor 6000 series. It was the 290X.
I was one of the idiots who went with a gtx 770 (same chip as 680) instead of a 290 because of 'power and heat' considerations, despite getting a pretty hot and noisy windforce 3x not much different than the sapphire 290 I was looking at.
@@Tudorgeable You made a mistake mate :(
But the Hawaii cards got a bad reputation because of the shitty coolers. As much as I like AMD/ATI they've always failed on customer experience. Then mining blew it for AMD.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946You're completely wrong about mining. It's been a saving grace for RTG and is what funds what comes after Navi. Gaming is no longer the #1 highest profit market for GPUs, there's a lot of other uses for them nowadays.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946The sapphire triple x cooler for the 290 was better or on par with what I had on a similarly priced gtx 770, I had just bitten the marketing trap and fell for it.
I bought a PC with the GTX 1070 over the 480 in early 2017. It was a while ago but from memory the deciders for me (at the time I wasn't as well read in hardware) were firstly the price difference in Australia wasn't as competitive for AMD. The 1070 had, and still has, an excellent reputation. My primary goal was to build a VR machine and while I didn't put too much stock in driver debates, fans on both sides were pretty adamant nvidia was the way to go for that. Finally because nvidia has the biggest market share, it's a lot easier to get an array of user reviews. Something I put less stock in now, but for a budding enthusiast, that was important to me then.
I believe at the time the R9 Fury and the 390 were also competing in price. While it was clear where the 980 vs 1070 were generation-wise, AMD had some obfuscation for that particular area.
The GTX 1070 was an excellent choice, and I don't regret it, what I do regret but only in hindsight was not getting a Ryzen CPU, but even then I probably would have got a cheap motherboard that couldn't have upgraded to the end of AM4 generation chips.
Hey Philip, I enjoy your spreadsheets of data, but I think on occasion something like conditional formatting would be appreciated :)
I've bought a RX 570 last week :D
I've bought weed last week :D
Good on you guys , seriously! AMD needs this RnD money and they are worth it for mid range cards
I have no idea what he is talking about but I appreciate the work that has been done.
Aye your channel is growing pretty fast. Nice.
Great video except at the use of the steam hardware survey at 12:30 ish. The problem with using this data is that it fails to mention that the immense popularity of nvidia's cards is due to the Asian market and their majority usage of PC Bangs and Internet Cafes, most of which are either directly sponsored by Nvidia or get subsidies from Nvidia to use their cards in their PCs. This causes a massive artificial influx of nvidia cards in the steam hardware survey as many of those users have not actually bought a nvidia or an AMD card at all, they just use them. The average person building a gaming PC, especially in the west probably has a much higher chance of having an AMD card in their system.
@@kshproductions7996 But did the statistics already in the database get fixed too? Or remain since the fix isn't retroactive?
@@kshproductions7996 thanks. That's what I wanted to know.
Amd drivers are strange. At first, the RX 580/480 drivers were strange. Now they are almost as fast as the GTX 1070 in quite a few games.
It is going to be incredibly difficult for AMD to make a major comeback. There are a lot of reasons to take Nvidia over AMD right now, and it has been that way for quite a long time now. The sad thing is without real competition Nvidia card prices are going way up.
If there's any time for a comeback to be made, it's now. The RTX launch is leaving people with a lot of sour tastes in their mouths (regardless of NVidia's motivation behind it) and AMD's likely going to announce their 7nm architecture's GPUs in January.
Still not very likely - Nvidia would probably have to bungle several launches in a row to waste the mindshare they have in the consumer market - but AMD might be able to make a dent in things if the stars align. They managed to give Intel a hell of a wake-up call with Zen last year, after all.
"There are a lot of reasons to take Nvidia over AMD right now"
like what reasons Tim F?
@@wabachi I would like to know them too. Haven't heard of anything truly meaningful in a while.
@@MJ-uk6lu 5 days and i'm still waiting...
@@Jordan-rNvgQ umm... i'm prty sure you can find something similar or better then ULMB... as for the most used reason by nvidia users "emulation" when ONLY cemu have this problem.... and the rest works fine as for the connectivity... different AIB can have different connection also converters for old monitors
those are not reasons to but one over the other when it is a bit to... how to put it... you might find it on both with bit of research and i don't think someone would buy a gtx 1080TI/2080TI or a vega56/64 strictly for emulation...
what i'm trying to say is that i don't find your reasons "strong reasons" to not buy one over the other tho...
I had an R9 390 and quite liked that card, it just felt powerful... But was also running hot and thus a bit too loud for my taste. I - sadly - got dragged into the mining "business" by a friend, and when things started going off the rails I sold my 390 and replaced it with an RX 580 that I previously used for mining. It felt like the exact same card, but with a much more silent design. I quite liked it but it really didn't feel like an improvement in terms of performance, so I soon ditched it for another card from the depths of Ethereum mines: a Vega 56. That really was an improvement in the performance department, and quite liked how fast games ran with it... at the rare times where I could actually hear them. Man, was that card loud!
At that point I ran out of options, I wanted something that's faster than a Polaris, but is still silent. For the first time in my life I decided to go with nVidia instead, and bought a 1070 Ti. In terms of efficiency this card was a huge improvement, it's a little bit f aster than the Vega 56 was, and is really silent. And I hate it.
Through all the years while I was using AMD cards I was always being told how their drivers suck donkey balls, and all that. You know what? There ISN'T A SINGLE DRIVER for my nVidia card that works well with all my games. Some driver versions cause stuttering in X games, other drivers make Y games stutter, it's ridiculous. And G-Sync, what a worthless piece of... You pay quite a lot for it, and then it works properly with like... 10% of the games currently on the market, at best?
Thanks to all my issues I became a regular visitor on the nVidia forums as well, and all the ignorance going on there is mind blowing. nVidia refuses to fix issues, they just concentrate on marketing their new products and selling new stuff... Once they got their claw in you, once you've already gave your money to them, you're no longer important, you're just a problem, not a respected customer.
I can totally understand all the people here rooting for AMD, the very first day Navi comes out I'll be back on the red team! nVidia is like the Apple of PC hardwares, looks tasty, smells good, the sugar coat is perfect, the price is high too, so it MUST be good, right? right?! Then you take the first bite, and meeehhhh, crap.
1:55 AHelllalalalllllalot
Had a 480 since launch. Loved it. Did great and even made a bit off mining it. Ended up selling it to a friend who was using a gtx660 for cheap and buying a used 1080 when the prices fell Bellow 350$ (got mine for 325$).
You seem to make the exact same points that AdoredTV made...very similar..
Nobody knows who that tiny youtuber is
@@dhkatz_ So it would be ok to steal content and spin it off, right?
@@sslim29205 What are you talking about?
@@ZadakLeader AdoredTV just Googles content made by others and narrates it to you. He doesn't even have the hardware he talks about....LOL
I had/have/used to use, a 290x with the three fans, that thing was like a jet engine in volume. I upgraded to a 1080 now and its a good 2-3 times quieter, not to mention the performance hike.
Launch the Polaris
The end doesn't scare us
When will this cease?
Geforce will all rust in peace.
I see you're a man of culture as well...
I was hoping to see this. great job.
I didn't think I'd learn as much as I did from this video. Thanks Philip!
Personally, as an inspiring content creator, I don't think I would've have ever bought AMD back then, no matter what.
As you said, they lacked an equivalent to shadowplay back then, and to be fair, kind of still do. Sure they have relive or whatever, but they don't have NVENC, which is supported by OBS, and a handful of other programs. They also don't really have an equivalent to CUDA that's as supported as it. That makes Nvidia far more appealing for people doing any kind of 3D work, and much more. The same will go for the RTX series, being great for professionals doing work with ray tracing and AI.
Back then AMD was also at a super low point due to CPUs aswell, Ryzen not being out yet iirc. AMD was not very competitive in CPUs, so people often went Intel/Nvidia instead of AMD.
Another issue was marketing VR. Although it's nice in theory to have VR for $200, and it's achievable at a low price point, it's appeal still mainly lies in enthusiasts, especially back then. This means that people who's price point was $200, didn't really care about VR. VR headsets were still very expensive, and so were there limited games. People who could justify getting into VR at the time, were usually the same people who were able to justify purchasing something far better, like a 1070 and 1080.
We are also starting to get more "less knowledgeable" people into the gaming scene, who just want what everyone else is using, which usually is Intel/Nvidia, as that's what all the content creators, or high end gaming rigs use. People don't really care that much about looking into price/performance like they used to in the past, or atleast the people I talk to don't anymore. Sometimes people just want the most expensive thing for whatever reason, look at smartphones.
That's personally why I think AMD failed during this launch and why I believe AMD need to start focusing on the content creator, like they did with Ryzen, for their GPUs, as Nvidia's feature set kinda blows AMD away.
@@3kliksphilip They do now, but it's not widely supported like NVENC is. I'm also not aware of which cards specifically support it. Thanks for reply btw, ily. Last time I got a reply is when youtube had direct messages and I sent you a shitty map I made when I was 13
the hardware h264 encoder on polaris has been supported fine on OBS, use it on my rx480 all the time, and have been doing so for a while now.
in them early polaris days you actually needed this bad boy:
obsproject.com/forum/resources/amd-advanced-media-framework-encoder-plugin-for-obs-studio.427/
yeah, nvidia was 3-4 years ahead with shadowplay, so naturally their nvenc got baseline implemented way sooner,
but, please don't make up nonsense about OBS and support for AMD hardware. :)
in fact , i HAD to use OBS on my gtx 760 for hardware capturing, as the nvidia software did not not let me use shadowplay, it wanted me to have a 770 or higher,
despite having the NVENC hardware, which meant i couldn't use it for ages until the software came along.
but yeah, totally agree on the cuda and industry thing (and rtx), they have that shit on lockdown,
introducing alternatives for it, that aren't 1:1 compatible is useless at this point.
i actually remember RTG making some kind of program to convert cuda code into code a radeon could crunch,
but never really heard much from that, i don't even remember what it's called anymore...
but yeah, that shit was only useful for converting standalone sciency cuda stuff anyway,
does nothing for 3d programs that need to natively support directly hooking into the hardware.
the alternative, opencl, still seems to have trouble taking off.
luckily, my 3d program of choice is blender, which is one of the exceptions that does have half-decent opencl support these days (even CPU+GPU rendering)
@@elikay2101 mhm do you know blender? a vega 64 renders any scene faster than a gtx 1080ti and now with amds pro renderer its even faster. AMD form of ray tracing was available for a long time known as "FireRays". For AI a vega card would be a no brainer against a GTX 1080ti considering it beats it in almost every scientific workload. BTW what are you creating?
"but they don't have NVENC, which is supported by OBS"
the hardware level encoding was present since their first gen architecture GCN 1.0 (i think it includes 7k series not sure) as philip said it's called VCE and could be used in OBS, i personally used to record 1080p 30fps 20k bitrate on a mid-range r9 270x, the more mid range r7 260x had GCN 1.1 (or 1.2 dont remember for sure) and they improved to support 1080p 60fps at the same bitrate...
usually people don't do proper research then say "oh this didn't had that or that or that"
@@wabachi true
Hey, so the reason why I got a 1050 Ti was that it was on sale for ~$100 US . AMD's closest offering (the 460) was listed at ~$130 at the time. It was just a better deal for me.
Just ordered 8x 580 4GB for 160€ each
@i Draw Generally you don't actually use mining as your sole source of income; some people that are willing to invest insane amounts of money do but mostly it's a mostly-passive form of income. The ROI can be 8 months or more. When you do hit break-even, though, it can be an extra few hundred dollars a month (depending on where you live). People also tend to eventually resell their cards to get more of that money back faster.
Also the biggest cause of the shortages was actually the big groups that would buy hundreds or more of the cards at a time. Not the people who would buy 10 or so. Especially people like this who probably bought used cards.
@i Draw LoL Here we have a dumbass who doesn't know anything about mining or what causes the prices to go up.
This is a great video, really enjoyed it. Well done. 👌
I was considering an AMD card for a future build due to FreeSync and better performance in some games I play. But given the hardware survey, I am a bit skeptical about it now. I have been pretty dependent on ShadowPlay on my current system, and I have an impression that ReLive is not as good.
With their dev leadership gone, I hope they still manage to succeed in their next launch, which should be soon according to their roadmap. Given the poor behaviour by Nvidia at the moment, we really need some good ol competition once again.
i use relive and it is every bit as good as shadowplay, in my experience
I haven't kept up to date, but a few months after ReLive came, benchmarkers/testers claimed it had better video quality and had less performance impact than Shadowplay.
I haven't used shadowplay (althought I guess I could test it), but as far as I can tell from the settings, relive is superior in most ways, having options for both AVC and HEVC, audio quality and a few extras for livestreaming
I use relive and find it quite a bit better than shadow play
It's like how Jim Keller moved on after taping out Ryzen.
Yup even my friend gone with 1050Ti instead of RX500 series. Gone with Intel Pentium G series instead of Ryzen 2200G that have the same freaking $price (Yes we are from Malaysia). I can’t brain this brand loyalty thing and also due to past reputation. Past reputation makes people stick with iPhones instead of more versatile and as powerful Androids like the latest Samsung Note ( 3/4th of a price in my country), Oneplus (fraction of a price), Pixel (almost the same price but with far better user experience and cloud service etc. This confirmed by my friend who’s a loyal iPhone fan since 3GS era up until the X (or Ten whatever you wanna call it) era he never once switch to other brand and also by a lots of reviewers out there) and many more.
I feel like the mining craze seriously hurt Polaris. In Australia, a 480/580 was almost as expensive as a 1070 when Etherium shot up in value.
I've been using a used 760Ti for like 2 years and it's been a great little card for £70 I paid on ebay but had to upgrade for newer games in late 2018. Looking at Nvidia's ridiculous pricing I chose to switch to AMD. Got an RX 580 Nitro for £170! Closest to this from the Nvidia camp was the crappy 3GB 1060 and that was at around £200 and more like an RX 570. That was an amazing purchase. Zipping through Forza Horizon 4 on Ultra at 60FPS is what I needed and at that price it was a no brainer. Nvidia is high if they think they can be the Apple of GPUs and constantly raise their prices like this.
need more tech videos like this!
Loved the video
something to add is that perhaps there is more prebuilds been sold with nvidia than amd, and because of that people that are buying prebuilds more than likely will see a pc with an nvidia gpu compared to an amd gpu.
I like to think the cryptomining boom hurt AMD a good bit since the price/performance ratio that they had as lost. I remember saving for a Vega 56 only to get suddenly shut out because the price had jumped so high.
At that point I just bought a used 980 Ti and somehow managed to exchange that for a GTX 1080.
I still want a Vega though.
i wish i knew what you were talking about with your epic gamer big boy words on computers because i love your voice and editing style
@@3kliksphilipThe comment i made wasn't made well, I men't to say is that I wish i knew more about computers are the history of companies and products. I don't really know much history about computer tech, (all i really know is that a 1080ti is good) but its mainly all the acronyms and numbers. Don't worry the way you presented the information was great, I liked how you actually correlated the facts and statistic to what they men't. Sorry if the comment was a bit provocative, great video as always.
13:30 hey my Country!!!
Malaysia got mentioned!!!
Thanks Philips u made my day
One important thing: These Graphic Cards were not used for mining Bitcoin, the mining of bitcoin is nowadays only done using ASIC miners. The different miners were all mining other currencies that are somewhat resistant to ASIC mining.
@12:30 The reason you see such a disparity in Polaris vs Pascal at the 1060 and below is because blockchain pretty much priced all of the AMD gpus out of consumer hands. The Pascal pricing didn't start inflating too bad until a RX480 started costing $400.
Currently using a Ryzen 3 2200G and a 4GB RX 580 :3
I love it... But yes most games I play are optimized for Nvidia
I've been using an AMD RX 470 for about 3 years now and I've never looked back. This little thing runs like a dream and my friend is inheriting it from me once the next good AMD GPU comes out. Could be the RX 590, who knows.....
@Brad Viviviyal nice try...
xeno maybe the new line up on 7nm?
Xeno, very happy i went for that GTX 1080 then!
Excellent analysis, I think you understated the problem of miners buying up Polaris and how this shows up in what people actually game with. If you look at AMD figures their market share should be much larger than what shows up in something like steam hardware survey. AMD had millions of polaris GPUs going out the factory door per month that just aren't out there being used for gaming. Ex-mining AMD cards are indeed flooding the second hand market right now.
Interestingly miners would undervolt and underclock Polaris cards and keep them well cooled and usually less dust clogged than a gamers card (Difference between garage vs someones dusty bedroom I guess), so the cards hitting the market are hardly burned out at all and probably should have a long life ahead. Gamers just aren't into buying second hand stuff, but I wonder if that habit will change now, and how will that shape the market for a while.
AMD's market share in Steam statistics might be very low but cryptocurrency miners bought a TON of these cards. Also, they supply CPU and GPUs for both PS4 and Xbox One. Their Ryzen CPU's compete very well with Intel in every price point. Hopefully they'll be able to compete again with Nvidia in consumer GPU's in near future.
Cards that were used for mining tend to be MORE reliable, not less, than other used GPUs (assuming the seller is reputable). They are typically undervolted while mining, and the fact that they are run 24/7 means there should be no defects and will continue to run for the foreseeable future.
I am very happy with my Polaris-based card, that is sold under the "RX Vega" brand, inside an Intel CPU. And by "happy" I mean confused.But also happy that Intel and AMD can get along to do that. Seriously, it's a thing that exists!
I live in Brazil and at least before the crypto boom, the RX 480 was a awsome card price-wise, I bought mine for R$200 less, the model I've choose was the Gaming X from MSI for R$1200, I got a overclockeble card that runs pretty cold, better than paying R$1400 for a basic 3GB 1060 mini from Zotac.
Cu
@@Dudu-dn5hz Mas qui diselegante meu consagrado
@@nagizah8 kkkkkokjnmkk os gringo pira
I have a RX 480 and I love it, still running great to this day and VR runs butter smooth
Currently using Polaris for gaming. Very happy with my Rx 480
I remember a couple years ago I was on the RX 480 train. Bought two of them was tried to OC them but this is where I learned backing off voltage on these cards would actually increase performance easily since AMD's set voltage was so high for the powerlimit that clock speeds suffered.
VRMs weren't that great either if you had them running at full power (the reference cooler) so I water blocked them. Ended up selling that PC did a build with Vega 56, I'm loving this card.
As someone who pre ordered an rx460 and had one since it came out to until very recently I think Polaris is good, the card was strong enough to run everything I needed it to and it was really cheap(about 120$).
as of Nov 2nd, 2018, the RX 590 has been announced, and benchmarks show it may equal a GeForce 1070, but for half the price!
Miners bought Polaris cards en masse, I haven't seen them in stock at MSRP until recently in Finland.
And before the craze they weren't stocked. It was AMD on back order or Nvidia immediately.
I just bought a MSI RX 570 8GB card, a bit late but thanks to Freesync support it is still a very capable FullHD card and the price was really great (155 EUR). I was surprised though that I could undervolt it massively (1.15V -> 925 mV) to keep it cool at 65°C, powerful at 1286/1950 MHz and quite all at the same time. It consumes just below 90 W in Battlefield 1 with a 48-72 Hz FreeSync monitor. Very remarkable indeed. The default values are awful in comparison though. What a shame that only now at the end of its shelf live, some more gamers get to appreciate so much value at its intended price range.
As a RX480 owner. I'm running games in 4K/60fps In many games. Gears Of War 4, Forza Horizon 4, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc with my I7 6700K CPU at Very High/Ultra Settings. For those games that dont, I drop to 3200X1800 at medium/high settings and get 60fps. Destiny 2, Tomb Raider, Battlefield 1 & 4. Not bad for a $199 card.
Awesome video, really caught me off guard.
4000 series was amazing.
People still bought the 200 series in droves. They where happy when the price dropped to compete with ATI... even when the 4000 series was still a massively better deal.
No matter how good ATI cards where - nobody bought them.
Polaris was solid, but I'm interested in what's next.
nVidia has gone crazy with their prices and it seems like we no longer have a great 970-like deal for midrange consumers.
man you really are a prophet. Navi came out and, as you said, everyone just went and got themselves 2060 and 2070 instead.
I enjoy these videos so much.
Both are a great deal. German pricing is atm 200€ for Rx 580 and 220€ for gtx 1060. Rx cards have assasins creed in the pack (key about 40€) so if you dont need it and sell it you would have pay around 160€ ...cant be any cheaper.
I had a 480, a asus dual 4gb model. Fantastically good card. I’ve upgraded to Vega now for rendering. But i will always stay with amd. I’ll likely have this card for a while.
8:14 some people were disappointed in the 400 series because they performed at 970 levels at launch and the fact that you could get a used or new old stock 980(5-20% faster at launch depending on game) at the release of Polaris for $200. If you didn't mind going used, you skipped Polaris honestly. I always compare new and old products because computer hardware ages amazingly compared to other consumer products.
Oh I had the R9 290! Yeah that was a very loud one. It was soo loud that, my family that was in other room were asking me why do I have kitchen mixer put into my PC. Little did they know it was a GPU with fans put to 30% of their speed... I hope I'll never stumble upon such loud piece of hardware. I instantly sold it.
I forgot to mention one little detail. It was overheating with the max fan speed, reaching over 110℃ in just Battlefield 3.
I think you're forgetting how much these were actually getting sold for, at least in the UK I went for a 1060 3GB as it was cheaper than a 470
Back when these cards released I was set to buy an upgrade for my 960, I ended up with a 1060 because the AMD card just weren't available from reputable retailers in my country and resellers on the equivalent of ebay would overprice the card by 50% even before crypto took the stage. Even now the local amazon only lists a single vega 64 and 2 vega 56 for sale. AMD MUST improve availability for Navi if they want to sell more.
I eventually settled on the Nvidia 1060 over the Radeon because I was using an Nvidia 680 before - and was getting into the Nvidia "Gamestream" system to stream games to other devices via the network in my home. Back then I was only dabbling with this, but today I don't think I could buy a AMD card anymore unless they come up with a System like this on their own. Steam Play is good, but a lot more lossy than GameStream, performance wise.
So it's not really brand loyalty. More... Needed functionality.
FreeSync you forgot to mention :) not the insane leap in price for partners to add the module as it is the case with the Gsync alternative
A 590 was announced, but it seems like to not be much better than the 580. However we don’t have benchmarks we don’t know.
Bear in mind, Mr kliksphillip, that pre built PCs, here in the UK, mainly use nvidia's GPUs only. This would account for a large percentage of users; the casuals who spend too much money so someone else builds their tower.
It's a shame, but my friend bought a 1060, only because there was no 470 available.
When I was building my PC, Polaris was simply not an option for me.
The mining craze was at its highest, and getting a Polaris card would cost be double the price of a 1050 Ti (the card I got).
If I was building a PC right now, I'd probably go with AMD (although they're a bit more expensive where I live).