In this review we look at the new AMD Radeon R9 285. Yes this is the new Tonga GPU based product that will drive the price from high-end gaming towards 249 USD while you can game with good image quali... Review: Radeon R9-285
What a pointless card. 3 years of 7900 series cards, just repackaged with lsightly different feature sets... all with barely defalting prices.
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.
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.
it gained 1130mhz on default voltage on Techpower-up Sapphire dual-x review. May be Hilbert was unlucky this time.
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.
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.
It does come with all the featuresets I guess. Its a good card to replace the R280, but nothing more.
Keep in mind the Guru3D review is for the Asus Strix R9 285, and it's not a reference card. So, the fact that it is ugly is because of Asus . You're all missing the point . The R9 285 is meant to be an updated R9 280, it's not meant to be a completely new card. It's also why they named it R9 285 and not R9 380. In other words, it's a tweaked R9 280 design with the GCN 1.1 modifications carried over. As a result, it isn't meant to be faster than the R9 280X. So, why is AMD being so slack you might ask? Well, in reality, they're not! The true next AMD cards are believed to be 20 nm, and the 20 nm process at TSMC is having issues. Nvidia are facing the same issues. If AMD were to bring out a truly new card, they would have to do so by spending large amounts of money on accelerated R&D, and it would only be a stopgap measure anyway. It was very much more effective for them to bring out a tweaked R9 280/R9-280X design, and continue to tweak their next gen design for when the 20 nm process is truly ready. Nvidia are in a similar position with their next GPU's (Maxwell), although instead of giving it a minor designation like R9 280 --> R9 285, they have giving it a major designation, the GTX 900 series. Yep, they skipped the 800 series to equalise the naming with the laptop branding, and also to make it sound more impressive than it really it? Wow, 780 Ti --> GTX 980, that must be a massive leap in performance! Well, according to leaked information... no, not really. Of course, the Nvidia cards will cost more! The main difference between AMD and Nvidia is that if Nvidia skip from the 780 Ti to GTX 980, and give the impression of a massive performance jump, even if there isn't, it will be the best things since 'sliced bread' to Nvidia Fanbois. If AMD do a similar thing, well, it's not really the same thing since they aren't calling it R9 380, just R9 285 (the 5 in effect representing an updated architecture), people b!tch and complain . Realistically both AMD and Nvidia have done stopgap approaches due to the 20 nm issue, so people who at least know this much shouldn't expect too much from either AMD or Nvidia. People on R9-280/280X probably won't see upgrading to the R9 285/285X as beneficial, even if there is a 5 percent performance gain. People on the Nvidia Geforce 780 (etc) cards would upgrade the the GTX 980, not only because it's a massive model number increase, but because for the very fact of a 5 percent increase in performance! I'm just putting that into perspective, the performance of Maxwell probably exceeds that. The consumer attitude is very much different between AMD fans and Nvidia fans. One thing I have noticed about both the Guru3D and the Techpowerup reviews, neither compared the R9 280 and the R9 285 directly. Maybe they were instructed not to? In any case, the results for the two would have been very similar. I did find the Guru3D and Techpowerup reviews interesting. The Guru3D review showed the R9 285 performing very similar to the HD 7950, which you would expect, however the Techpowerup review shows it performing quite reasonably against the other cards when you take all things into consideration. Like I said, it isn't meant to be exceptionally faster, just a further tweaked design. If people really want a next gen design they will either have to wait for the R9 300 series or the Geforce 'Pascal' cards.
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 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.
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.
Future drivers may be interesting then, since they make make use of the extra features more fully. It's interesting that the reviews on different sites all show the R9 285 differently performance wise, even though they're running the same driver. It's possible that the AMD drivers have been 'slow' lately because they have been working on a major driver release. This is going by a combination of rumours, and what we have actually seen in only very minor changes for the last couple of months.
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..
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.
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.
