Radeon RX Series: Video Encode and Decode
The Radeon™ RX Series brings a new video encode capability to improve your content streaming and gameplay recording experience. The Radeon RX Series hardware supports the latest in video decoding for HDR content, bringing more color and vibrancy to your streaming entertainment.
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AMD Radeon Rx 300 is brand for a series of graphics cards. All used GPUs have been developed by AMD, produced in 28nm and belong to the same microarchitecture family: Graphics Core Next (GCN).
Devices based on the Fiji architecture, which include the flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X along with the Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon R9 Nano, are the first GPUs to feature High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technology which is faster and more power efficient than current GDDR5 memory. However, the Rx 300-numbered GPUs in the series are based on previous generation GPUs with revised power management and therefore only feature GDDR5 memory. The Radeon 300 series cards including the R9 390X were released on June 18, 2015. The flagship device, Fury X, was released on June 24, 2015.
The Radeon 400 series is a series of graphics cards made by AMD. These cards will be the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process. The Polaris family will initially include two new chips in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) family (Polaris 10 and Polaris 11). Polaris implements the 4th generation of the Graphics Core Next instruction set, and shares commonalities with the previous GCN microarchitectures.
RX 480 reference card PCI Express power limit violations[edit]
Some reviewers discovered that the AMD Radeon RX 480 violates the PCI Express power draw specifications, which allows a maximum of 75 watts being drawn from the motherboard's PCI Express slot. Chris Angelini of Tom's Hardware noticed that in a stress test it can draw up to an average of 90 watts from the slot and 86 watts in a typical gaming load. The peak usage can be up to 162 watts and 300 watts altogether with the power supply in a gaming load. TechPowerUp corroborated these results by noting it can also draw up to 166 watts from the power supply, past the limit of 75 watts for a 6-pin PCI Express power connector. Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective did a follow-up test after other reports and found out his review sample takes 80-84 watts from the motherboard at stock speed, and that the other PCI Express slots' 12 volt power supply pins were supplying only 11.5 volts during load on his Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme motherboard. He was not concerned about the voltage droop, however, due to the specification's 8% voltage tolerance, but did note of systems where multiple overclocked RX 480 cards are running in quad CrossFire, or in motherboards that are not designed to withstand high currents, such as budget and older models.
AMD has released a driver that reprograms the voltage regulator module to draw less power from the motherboard, allowing the power draw from the motherboard to pass the PCI Express specification. While this worsens the overage on the 6-pin power connector, that violation is not much of a concern because these connectors have a greater safety margin in their power rating. The amount of power drawn from the 6-pin power connector is dependent a newly introduced "compatibility mode" in the driver. When on, compatibility mode reduces the total power consumption of the card, allowing both power sources to operate closer their ratings. Standard mode yields essentially unchanged performance, while compatibility mode results in performance drops within the error of benchmarks.[18]Some RX 480 cards designed by AMD's partners include an 8-pin power connector which can provide more power than the stock design.