Thursday, August 27th 2015
AMD Announces the Radeon R9 Nano Graphics Card
AMD continues to push the boundaries of graphics card design, today announcing its category-creating AMD Radeon R9 Nano, the fastest Mini ITX graphics card ever to enable 4K gaming in the living room through ultra-quiet, ultra-compact PC designs. First previewed to gamers around the world during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles in June 2015, the AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics card is based on the graphics chip codenamed "Fiji," and is the third "Fiji"-based product to launch this summer alongside the AMD Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Fury X graphics cards. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics family, based on the "Fiji" chip, marks a turning point in PC gaming with the implementation of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to deliver extreme energy efficiency and performance for ultra-high resolutions, unparalleled VR experiences, smoother gameplay, with the Radeon R9 Nano revolutionizing form-factors for enthusiasts everywhere.
With 30 percent more performance and 30 percent lower power than the previous generation AMD Radeon R9 290X card, the 175W AMD Radeon R9 Nano is the world's most power efficient Mini ITX enthusiast graphics card. The six-inch long, air-cooled board represents a new class of graphics card, enabling gamers, PC modders, and system integrators to build compact, unique, ultra-small form factors that have never before been possible, opening the door to new, sleek PC designs that are no bigger than a home DVR or videogame console, and look every bit in place beside them.
"With the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card, AMD is enabling 4K class gaming in your living room in an exceptionally quiet, ultra-small design built to excel in today's games and on the latest APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. There simply is nothing else like it," said Matt Skynner, corporate VP and general manager, Product, Computing and Graphics Business Unit at AMD. "Our Radeon graphics line-up is ushering in a new era of PC gaming delivering remarkable performance, unmatched GPU designs and groundbreaking technologies. Today is a revolutionary moment for PC gaming, and we are proud to add this distinct product to our well-rounded AMD Radeon R9 graphics lineup."
The AMD Radeon R9 line of graphics cards offers a spectrum of products ranging in price from $199 - $649 SEP. The Radeon R9 Nano is priced at $649 (MSRP). Delivering stunningly powerful graphics for unparalleled 4K gaming experiences in their class, the AMD Radeon R9 Series meets virtually every need and budget for anyone who demands a premium gaming experience.
With 30 percent more performance and 30 percent lower power than the previous generation AMD Radeon R9 290X card, the 175W AMD Radeon R9 Nano is the world's most power efficient Mini ITX enthusiast graphics card. The six-inch long, air-cooled board represents a new class of graphics card, enabling gamers, PC modders, and system integrators to build compact, unique, ultra-small form factors that have never before been possible, opening the door to new, sleek PC designs that are no bigger than a home DVR or videogame console, and look every bit in place beside them.
The AMD Radeon R9 line of graphics cards offers a spectrum of products ranging in price from $199 - $649 SEP. The Radeon R9 Nano is priced at $649 (MSRP). Delivering stunningly powerful graphics for unparalleled 4K gaming experiences in their class, the AMD Radeon R9 Series meets virtually every need and budget for anyone who demands a premium gaming experience.
81 Comments on AMD Announces the Radeon R9 Nano Graphics Card
If it is a manufacturing cost factor then AMD's balance sheet for the next 3-4 quarters is going to look decidedly ugly. Unless DX12 throws them a Hail Mary pass for the ages, debt servicing is going to cornhole AMD. Paring back R&D any further is going to impact what we see (or don't see) in 2017, 2018...
When AMD is in red, because it seems they will be there no matter what they do, it doesn't matter so much if it is MINUS 150 M $ or MINUS 180 M $.
Instead of blind prices positioning, they can at least try to screw nvidia's party and heavily sponsor cards like the R9 Nano for considerably lower price tags. Give us that damn Nano for 450$ and call it a day. It will hurt nvidia, that's for sure. But no. :D
Of course, it woun't happen if there is an active cartel between those two.
1. That 8GB of vram doesn't get any better using CFx... not sure what you are trying to say there.
2. I can breach 4GB in BF4 with changing the resolution scaling (I run at 2560x1440 which is a 'plausible' resolution). GTA V can also easily breach 4GB at 1080p, I believe The Witcher can as well.
Fury cards with their interposer and HBM are likely more expensive to produce than their nvidia counterparts so starting a pricing war has the potential to hurt AMD more. And then you also have to consider that AMD is in financial trouble already and simply can't afford to lose even more money.
There's also the issue with Fury supply which seems to be limited but the cards still get sold at the price level AMD set. It would be stupid to change the pricing when it's actually optimal at this point.
The Witcher is a totally different beast. The developers just cramp as many textures as possible into the VRAM, even ones that will never be used because they are for areas miles away from the player. So the game doesn't actually suffer if only have 4GB of VRAM, it just doesn't load the furtherest textures.
I have never played Witcher, so I don't know what happens when your vram is stuffed... but it can get stuffed.
Maybe something is not so optimal.
You have no right to say optimal and being in the red at the same time. Both contradict to each other. Unless you intentionally want to be in red.
It didn't turn out quite so well, and competitor managed to catch up and even surpass the performance goals set for the "HALO" product we know as Fury series.
What they need is reasonably fast & decent perf/w & affordable card they can sell huge quantities. That is where the big bucks are.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, which you can't produce in volume quantities or cheap was a bad move. I hope they saw this coming as well and moved resources to focus more on next gen cards long before Fury release. That, or they are completely screwed in near future.
You can only fire so many people and decrease R&D costs until you simply put lose the game.
don't buy a Ferrari when you can buy 2 cheap Mercedes with the same amount of money.
I bet 2x 3.5 GB 970, considering the Dx12 bench and the win10 issues are the real deal nowadays.
...and if nVidia decides to support a different technology in their bloatware, you'll have your performance floored... just like the 700series fiasco with DC. There are many 780 owners out there(they don't even see their cards in the recent reviews, unlike some 290 and 290x cards.)
I guess many other factors are wrong - like expenses inside the company, not very good contracts with GF and TSMC who might be charging a lot, not enough volume of sales which potentially could change something.... etc.
The brand name doesn't help either.
AMD borrowed heavily (around $2bn) to finance the ATI acquisition. AMD paid $5.4bn in stock and cash, which turned out to be about $3bn too much.
With the debt burdon, and ATI's products not financing it, AMD has had to keep pouring funds meant to keep them competitive into bank loan repayments - which has generally meant that R&D goes hungry, and assets get sold to keep creditors happy.
Less R&D means less end product, and late product - and losing agility in a fast moving market usually means death.
Stripping away assets like their foundry business also meant that AMD was also totally dependent upon others for manufacture and timetable. Paying someone else to fab your chips also introduces their profit margin in the equation. I doubt whether AMD could/would have held on to their foundry business in any case (thanks to bigger fish like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and a higher level of competition from UMC and Chartered Semiconductor) - but at least they could have sold (or spun-off) the business under their own terms rather than being forced into a fire sale (although it did dig them part of the way out of the hole)AMD don't enjoy what is known as "Top of the Mind" brand awareness. Some companies have a higher stature with consumers than others - are recognized within their fields as leaders. Some are recognized as followers....and some aren't recognized at all. Intel has it, AMD doesn't - and most of that stems from the late 1960's. Back in the day, consumers didn't buy computers or computer parts. Computers were bought by tech engineers at companies from engineers at semiconductor makers. Intel was founded on IP and engineering (Moore and Noyce mainly, but many others as well - even if a lot of the prior work had been done by the same people at Farirchild. Even Andy Grove has a masters degree in chemical engineering). AMD was founded by two salesmen (Sanders and Turley), one bona fide semicon engineer (Sven-Erik Simonsen), five analog circuit engineers (Gifford, Botte, Stenger, and Stiles), and John Carey (engineering manager). None, except Simonsen, had much stature in the semiconductor business in relation to the staff at Intel. Then of course Intel started advertising and marketing to consumers before anyone else really got a handle on why they should.
This ATi acquisition turns out to be one of the biggest mistakes in human history.
Not only customers feel its consequences negatively because of lack of real progress in industry as a whole but also AMD will be extremely lucky if they get out of this deep hole in which those devils at ATi and the creditors put them.
What did they think when they forced ATi to sell itself with these 3 B $ overcharge ?
What are the positives of the A10 line? None compared to the cost paid.
We could have been much happier with AMD competitive to Intel, and ATi to nvidia. But no.
From four healthy companies, we are left with two - and the worse of them. :(
Oxide Developer on Nvidia's request to turn off certain settings:
“There is no war of words between us and Nvidia. Nvidia made some incorrect statements, and at this point they will not dispute our position if you ask their PR. That is, they are not disputing anything in our blog. I believe the initial confusion was because Nvidia PR was putting pressure on us to disable certain settings in the benchmark, when we refused, I think they took it a little too personally.”
“Personally, I think one could just as easily make the claim that we were biased toward Nvidia as the only ‘vendor’ specific code is for Nvidia where we had to shutdown Async compute. By vendor specific, I mean a case where we look at the Vendor ID and make changes to our rendering path. Curiously, their driver reported this feature was functional but attempting to use it was an unmitigated disaster in terms of performance and conformance so we shut it down on their hardware. As far as I know, Maxwell doesn’t really have Async Compute so I don’t know why their driver was trying to expose that. The only other thing that is different between them is that Nvidia does fall into Tier 2 class binding hardware instead of Tier 3 like AMD which requires a little bit more CPU overhead in D3D12, but I don’t think it ended up being very significant. This isn’t a vendor specific path, as it’s responding to capabilities the driver reports.
NVIDIA is just ticking the box for Async compute without any real practical performance.
The investors in this major-fail company will lose a lot of money.
So, again, you are wrong - I am not putting on the table anyone's survival.
Maybe the employees of AMD would be better off if they worked for another company that was managed properly. No?
Hrmpf.