Tuesday, December 5th 2017
AMD Officially but Silently Downgrades Radeon RX 560 with an 896 SP Variant
The phenomenon of Radeon RX 560 graphics cards with 896 stream processors is more widespread than earlier thought. It looks like RX 560 cards with 896 stream processors will be more widely available than the previously thought Greater China region; with AMD silently editing the specifications of the SKU to have either 896 or 1,024 stream processors, as opposed to the 1,024 it originally launched with. There are no clear labeling guidelines or SKU names to distinguish cards with 896 stream processors from those with 1,024.
The Radeon RX 560 and the previous-generation RX 460 are based on the 14 nm "Polaris 11" silicon, which physically features 16 GCN compute units (CUs), each packed with 64 stream processors. The RX 560 originally maxed this silicon out, with all 16 CUs being enabled, while the RX 460 has two CUs locked. The decision to change specs of the RX 560 effectively makes it a re-brand of the RX 460, which is slower, and provides fertile grounds for bait-and-switch lawsuits.
Source:
Heise.de
The Radeon RX 560 and the previous-generation RX 460 are based on the 14 nm "Polaris 11" silicon, which physically features 16 GCN compute units (CUs), each packed with 64 stream processors. The RX 560 originally maxed this silicon out, with all 16 CUs being enabled, while the RX 460 has two CUs locked. The decision to change specs of the RX 560 effectively makes it a re-brand of the RX 460, which is slower, and provides fertile grounds for bait-and-switch lawsuits.
129 Comments on AMD Officially but Silently Downgrades Radeon RX 560 with an 896 SP Variant
This reminds me of the Radeon 800 pro vs Radeon 800XT. You could flash it and unlock a few shaders to get a few hundreds of points for free. But the difference really was marginal, nothing to write about it.
Lol, those cards arent a 560/560d. They are 20% faster. These barely play 1080p on ultra in many titles. Again, fps count more so down low, than it does up high. ;)
The performance difference will be again, a few percent, and not 'loads' of difference.
That 10% matters when you are near the "cusp" of smooth gameplay.
The point is , that was different from this situation. In this case we have a product that has two separate entries and the issue is that the consumer doesn't know exactly which is which. However the existence of these specs was not concealed , just simply not made clear.
In the case of the 970 it was concealed , everywhere by everyone. Nvidia and the AIBs. The reason why only Nvidia got blamed is because they said that they distributed incorrect marketing material "by mistake".
So to get back to your initial comment , your observation simply isn't relevant to this discussion. I have no clue as to what are you even trying to prove.
However, this is not the first time AMD has tried to directly pull a switch on people, and released cards that will perform worse than what was reviewed. People going out to buy a graphics card today, trying to do proper research before they buy, are going to be reading reviews and they might be looking at buying the RX 560. They will see performance data for the full RX 560, because lets face it we are far enough along in the product cycle that no major review site is going to go back and re-review the RX 560 896SP Edition, and AMD and AIBs aren't sending out review samples either I'm betting. This is where the real problem is, and what makes what AMD did much worse than what nVidia did.
Also, to be fair, I don't think the AIBs even knew about the memory issue on the GTX970. As far as they were concerned, they were designing PCBs to connect to a GPU that had a 256-Bit memory bus. The memory mapping partition and memory bus being divided was handled all inside the GPU.
AMD on the other hand is pure evil , tryna steal our money with their lowest end cards and minuscule market share using cutting edge scamming techniques.
It's OK , we know the story. Seriously , no need for a wall of text to explain that..
Legit questions , I am curios as you seem 100% convinced that's how things are.
How did it transition to Nvidia :confused::wtf:
Let's not make this into another AMD v Nvidia drama:banghead: otherwise I will issue thread bans or vacations to those who continue to troll/derail this thread.
That's the first time I remember them pulling a stunt like this.
But most importantly it's totally unrelated to things such as false adverting and having multiple specifications of the same product which is what this is mainly about. There is a pretty significant difference between those things and examples of bad engineering.
Instead of just replacing the faulty cards with a fixed version, they decided to just limit performance.