AMD RX 480 with 8 Gigs of Vram at $229

AMD just had their live stream on their new RX 480 GPU. Although only equal to a Nvidia 970, it comes with 8 Gigs of Vram at a relatively low price. Will buying 2 or 3 RX 480 GPU with 8 gigs of RAM each outperform a Nvidia 1080 for Cycles Render?

If you want to invest in messing around with AMD’s OpenCL compiler and its spotty ability to compile Cycles, go right ahead. I have better things to do with my time. Looks like an amazing midrange card for gaming though.

The gtx 1070 is a better choice for blender rendering.

Yeah, 1070 still a better choice, though I was impressed by the Rx 480, it’s a good deal and finally their architecture cuts back on a LOT of power usage!

That being said, the 1070 is also crazy power efficient. I could see myself with 4 of the blower (non FE) cards together. It’s only a bit less powerful than a 980ti in gaming, though the difference is probable more when it comes to rendering.

Yeah, I get that, I hope they can get opencl sorted out so that we can take advantage of these cards. It’s just such a good price, but it is too bad cycle work better with nvidia cards.

Just to note, the Polaris architecture is meant to be a mid-range card (they will unveil their high-end late this year with Vega).

I am quite impressed by the price (you can practically get three of these for the price of a 1080, providing your machine can accommodate them at course). Considering that Blender’s viewport is getting more GPU-centric, I may finally have the push to upgrade from the HD 79xx card that came with my machine.

Also, here is the AMD press release
http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/radeon-rx-480-2016may31.aspx

The entry level card in the bunch only has 4 gigs of VRAM (as opposed to the mentioned 8), but the price is only 199 USD. The link also mentions that things might be starting to look up for AMD as they are starting to claw back some of their lost marketshare.

Unless you are doing GPU rendering, this practically seems like a no-brainer upgrade.

hm…
I usually associate amd products with garbage

This makes it a little less easy to generalise…

nice… anyone knows of DIY GPU box options or alternatives to Razer Core, something alike:http://gizmodo.com/heres-the-box-that-can-turn-your-puny-laptop-into-a-gra-1724958260?

hi burnin
did you mean something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1IRQTqMMY or like this http://amfeltec.com/products/gpu-oriented-cluster or http://amfeltec.com/splitters-gpu-oriented/?view=list ?

They should become more affordable and have a wider selection once USB Type-C and Thunderbolt become common in laptops.

There are a lot of Chinese PCI extenders for laptops but they’re very clunky and usually hard to install because laptops lack a proper port for them.

i plan to get an RX480/8G once more than the Reference Designs are out. Well see how it goes, wish we had Volume Support at the Moment for OpenCL ( Currently chumming with a R9 390X / 8G ). Finally want to retire my GTX 770 as that thing pushes incredible heat and noise after a while ( yes i cleaned that out and have proper airflow between the two cards ). ^^

Cheers!

This is important information here, if you look at the list of features (they are outdated as of now) AMD isn’t far behind Nvidia when it comes to rendering features. SSS and Volume support are the only two features not currently supported on AMD hardware. We Transparent shadows and hdr lighting are both now supported using experimental feature set.

Kinda important because many thing are made of theses things. Unless you just want to make shiny spheres.

Depends on the use. In architectural visualisation, you never need true volumes and seldom SSS. Faked variants of those are more than enough. Anyway, I better wait for the bench tests on Luxmark 3 of those new 4xx Cards. And even if they are not so good at rendering, it will make the price of the other team lower in 3 weeks :slight_smile:

Maybe for Christmas we will have a nvidia response to this card.

OH SNAP!

I am picking one of these up :slight_smile:

Nvidia already responded. They lowered the prices of their older 900 series cards so if you don’t mind an older card like an 980ti you can get for a decent price now.

You can get an MSI 6G gaming edition Ti for like $410 bucks on Newegg right now. That being said I’m holding off until AMD’s flagship comes out. Funnily enough the regular 980 is actually more expensive than the TI right now.

That being said, for $229 at close to 980 performance I don’t think the RX480 is too bad. I’m sure there will be an RX480X or something at some point and the non-reference cards have reportedly been great overclockers. I saw something about one of these running at 1.5ghz. So I expect the OEMs to some interesting things there.

I know OpenCL is behind, but will they catch up to CUDA this year or early next year? If not, then I will probably stick with Nvidia for now.

Hi, nobody knows, the last feature for OpenCL was HDR environment map added a few days ago.
SSS, Volumetrics and so forth are still no in.
If you don´t need it card is fine, you can also mix Nvidia and AMD cards.

Cheers, mib