Radeon Fury any good?

[pixelplucker]

Been in the market for a new video card, looking for something that has workstation performance without the big price ticket and came across the Fury cards that have 4096 bit data path. Seemed interesting but wonder if they have any double precision available on them?

 

Seems so far in my hunt for a new card the range I was looking at is the Quadro m4000 or AMD FirePro w7100 or w8100. Not even sure if those are worh the money they are asking.

 

I don't run a 4k display and only use my single 21ux cintiq so 4gb of memory should be plenty. The issues I have with my GTX 950 is limited zoom range on cad models and the shaded surfaces aren't exactly matched with edges when zoomed in so tiny feature can be a chore to work on especially when trying to correct trimmed surfaces etc.

[Roger]

GPUboss.com shows the fury pretty close to the 480:

 

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-RX-480-vs-Radeon-R9-FURY

 

Fury has better floating point, though. FWIW, I recently upgraded to a 480 and I'm happy with it. Haven't yet used with AM.

[Fuchur]

If you want less power consumption, the R9 Nano might be right for you, other than that the R9 Fury is a solid card for a good price point.

Of cause I have not tested how they perform against a FirePro or Quadro, but those are in general very expensive and if you do not use software with special drivers for those cards, you can very likely just leave those behind because they are not faster without the additional driver support but cost twice as much.

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[pixelplucker]

I believe that I could enable advanced functions on the workstation cards where as they are off by default on the desktop cards. This would allow me to use the dp on programs that don't specifically have a driver for them right?

 

I remember seeing those options when I had my quadro but things could have changed.

 

Not sure but looks like the Fury has been discontinued?

 

Thanks for the feedback, will wait and see where the market goes, looks like new crap coming out that will drop the price on the older crap.

[Rodney]

I don't know if/how it might apply to their older cards but...

 

AMD recently released a load of new software updates under the Radeon Relive brand:

 

http://radeon.com/en-us/software/relive/

 

At a glance it appears to primarily target gamers who want to record and live stream their gameplay and for VR experiences.

 

Here's a video that discusses the release:

 

xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSm12lwRe4

 

Added: The video briefly discusses software called 'Wattman' which is said to extend AMD power management to older AMD hardware.

[pixelplucker]

Interesting, don't see further info for custom setting of precision mode though.

[Rodney]

Not that I know anything about radeon cards but from what I read...

 

It appears the Firepro series of cards are the ones that focus on precision (and add double precision).

 

Customers can choose between fast single-precision, single-slot card solutions like the AMD FirePro™ W7000 GPUs that are optimized for double-precision, like the AMD FirePro™ W9100.

 

That sentence doesn't quite parse correctly though.

It's almost like instead of 'that' they meant to say 'and those that'.

[pixelplucker]

All the modern cards have both sp and dp on them. The desktop cards run only in sp mode and the workstation versions have a different rom and drivers that enable the dp. You need the driver to use the dp for programs that will implement it from what I gather. On the workstation cards at least on the quadro side you had advanced options that allowed you to invoke those settings on any program through a profiler. I am assuming not much has changed but they may have dumbed it all down.

 

I don't want to piss away 500-900 on a video card to find out some dork simplified all of that and not have the option of being able to use dp.

Still looking on the web to see if there is some sort of utility that would allow me to use dp on specified programs using an ordinary game card like the rx480 or gtx 1070 etc.

 

Really annoying when companies do this.

[pixelplucker]

Answered my own question, looks like the only desktop cards that allow you to use dp would be the Nvidia Titan series. Outside of that it is strictly workstation option only.

 

Technically it is possible to use a desktop card for dp but you would need a driver to combine the cuda cores or threads on AMD to what ever that ratio is required ie 3:1 or 4:1 etc.

 

Too bad someone hasn't made a hack for that

[Roger]

That's disappointing. Part of the reason I bought my 480 was for compute, disappointed now that I can only use it for single-point precision FP. I couldn't afford to spend double on a graphics card for the same functionality.

[pixelplucker]

Not exactly critical in AM but if your doing any cad surface modeling it can be a pain when you can't zoom in enough and have visual artifacts. For myself I do a lot of small text models that have draft angles and the draft angles can pose glitches. If those models are exported there is a chance a face can cross over blocking or filling in the model like in the letter B, O's and others that have negative spaces.

 

Looks like there is another generation of cards coming out so maybe the older ones will be less money.

[Fuchur]

Just a question about that: Can't your model be scaled 100x while modeling and rescaled before export?

 

See you
*Fuchur*

[pixelplucker]

Scaling can get complex when using real world tolerances such as threads, threads on tapers etc. Get's to be too much to keep track. On simpler stuff I make the models 2x or 4x their original size but not on parts that have other parts involved from other files. Too messy for my old tired brain.

[pixelplucker]

After tons of shopping around I ended up with the RX 480 as Roger has. Great Suggestion Roger, Thanks!

 

It is basically the same card as the WX7100 workstation card with higher wattage and only single precision. I am able to work around the dp issue with graphic settings within MOI and found out that MOI would not take advantage of dp at this time. I had to change camera type to parallel so there is no clipping plane and change the break angle for rendering shading so it better conforms to the iso lines.

 

Nice not having the stutter that the GTX 950 started to give me nor the screen artifacts which seem to be driver related. Makes me suspect that maybe Nividia is deliberately forcing older cards to perform poorly in hopes people upgrade. That's my conspiracy theory and I'm stickin to it