Wednesday, June 1st 2016
AMD Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199
AMD made a bold move in launching its first "Polaris" architecture based performance-segment GPU, the Radeon RX 480 at a starting price of US $199. The company claims that it will perform on-par with $500 graphics cards from the previous generation, directly hinting at performance being on par with the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Nano. Although it's not in the league of the GTX 1070 or the GTX 1080, this level of performance at $199 could certainly disrupt things for NVIDIA, as it presents an attractive option for people still gaming on 1440p and 1080p resolutions (the overwhelming majority). The R9 Fury can handle any game at 1440p.
The Radeon RX 480 is based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" silicon, fabbed by GlobalFoundries. It's publicly known that GloFlo has a 14 nm fab in Malta (upstate New York), USA. The RX 480 is based on AMD's 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, codenamed "Polaris." It features 2,304 stream processors, spread across 36 compute units (CUs). Its single-precision floating point performance is rated by AMD to be "greater than 5 TFLOP/s." The chip features a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with memory clocked at 8 Gbps, yielding memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. There will be two variants of this card, 4 GB and 8 GB. It's the 4 GB variant that starts at $199, the 8 GB variant is expected to be priced at $229. AMD confirmed that the GPU will support DisplayPort 1.4 although it's certified up to DisplayPort 1.3. The typical board power is rated at 150W. The card could be available from 29th June.
The Radeon RX 480 is based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" silicon, fabbed by GlobalFoundries. It's publicly known that GloFlo has a 14 nm fab in Malta (upstate New York), USA. The RX 480 is based on AMD's 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, codenamed "Polaris." It features 2,304 stream processors, spread across 36 compute units (CUs). Its single-precision floating point performance is rated by AMD to be "greater than 5 TFLOP/s." The chip features a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with memory clocked at 8 Gbps, yielding memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. There will be two variants of this card, 4 GB and 8 GB. It's the 4 GB variant that starts at $199, the 8 GB variant is expected to be priced at $229. AMD confirmed that the GPU will support DisplayPort 1.4 although it's certified up to DisplayPort 1.3. The typical board power is rated at 150W. The card could be available from 29th June.
104 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199
With performance somewhere around the GTX 970, NVIDIA's next SKUs can include a 299$ GTX 1060 Ti with GTX 980-like performance, and than a non Ti SKU with GTX 970-like performance for about 229$.
That said, AMD is first on the new-gen mid-range market, so they'll get the sales first
This SKU is disruptive af.
I'll wait for the next couple to be released to see what happens to the market.
I think AMD are starting from the bottom and progressing towards the top, unlike Nvidia which started big, then goes downhill.
Edit, it seems they are using the same game plan after all.
The RX480 is the C7 chip.
using Ashes game as a benchmark is a clear move, a game which the Fury X utterly destroys a GTX 980 Ti by dozens of percents. In reality we all know they are neck to neck.
Again, just taking things with a grain of salt, as always. I don't let flashy prices and PR charts let me go mental.
If performance is on par with the Fury, than kudos, it will make NVIDIA profit a bit less from their future GTX 1060 Ti and GTX 1060 to compete.
It's "to be launched": shouldn't this topic's title be changed?
nop, not buyin
RGB SSD/HDD when!?
GlobalFoundries seems to have finally got its head in the game.
If it is shorter than 240mm, quiet and does not have a bunch of LEDs, then I might need to abandon my idea of switching to 1070 or 1060.
Can't beat that $199 price tag.
Maybe i'm wrong but i thought 1080 was launched while 1070 was announced. And polaris, like 1070, is announced, no? Isn't it to be launched on the 29th of June?
GTX 1080 was announced, 2 weeks later reviewed, 2 week after that released, 2 days after 1080 released 1070 was reviewed. 1070 wont be released until June 10th.
performance seems kinda meh (well have to wait for decent benchmarks)
tdp seems alright
and the default design is a dual slot card, which is kinda of a bummer. if it had been a single slot card by default i be interested in one or two, but like this, meh, ill pass
Also since the spec are similar to whats rumored to be in the PS4-Neo I think they didnt want to step on Sonys announcement at E3 in 2 weeks either. Then there is Microsoft rumors of XB Scorpio.
As far as i know, when a card is launched, there are reviews from (selected) tech sites, even if it's a paper launch and there's no real availability to the public. This is not the case with polaris, hence why i consider it's an announcement instead of a launch.