Monday, May 9th 2016
AMD to Launch First "Polaris" Graphics Cards by Late May
The first AMD Radeon graphics cards based on the company's "Polaris" architecture are slated for a late-May launch, according to Thai tech-site Zolkorn. The company is reportedly planning an elaborate launch event in Macau, China, days ahead of the 2016 Computex trade-show in Taipei. AMD has reportedly already sent invites to media outlets, although to a very limited number (in comparison to, say, NVIDIA's GTX 1080 event in Austin, US). The event could see a paper-launch of the first Radeon R9 400 series graphics cards based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" and "Baffin" chips, with AIB-branded cards being exhibited at Computex, and market-availability following shortly after.
Source:
Zolkorn
107 Comments on AMD to Launch First "Polaris" Graphics Cards by Late May
If amd puts a 300$ card out with 390 like performance that could eat in their sales as that puts it in price range of gtx1070 which would be a bit more powerful then it and for people able and willing to pay extra will.if it was 300$ as i posted above no, i no question pay extra 70-80$ get a card that looks like it is around 40-50% more powerful. Some people see that and would agree.Yea AMD always gets a ton of hype in their gpu but has been lacking last few generations. they could come up big but shouldn't hype your self up to what hasn't been hype worthy til its proven to be worth it.Seems like game might be at that point is cpu is holding the game back not the gpu. If game is getting to point of cpu limited then testing gpu's on it is pointless since they will all look the same.
I don't think the Polaris 10 cards are ready to run at 40% higher clocks than the Hawaii cards. AMD simply planned for the Polaris 10 cards to replace the 390/390X cards, and so all the testing and packaging for Polaris over the past 4 to 6 months were done under these requirements.
It's unfortunate for AMD that they have such stupid management that decided to not release Fury/FuryX replacements this year and let Nvidia dominate the high-end GFX market. What they didn't account for is Nvidia dominating the mid-range GFX market too.
He said 50/60% better performance then the GTX980, lets look at the Witcher 3 there...yep about 60 - 70% better.
The VR info in the lower left is some extra information regarding the first "Virtual Reality" performance comparison.
Neither card is out already arguing which is faster lol. Point is if AMD has a good GPU coming out soon, it better be good! Nvidia is only paper, but were already comparing? I WANT AMD to do good here bring my purchase price point down, no need to spend over $700 on a GPU not IMHO.
As for Polaris, they've been telling to the public that they're targeting mid-range, with cheap(er) cards first, so that the general public can get decent VR perfromance and don't have to spend much, meaning low and mid range, where by the way most cards are sold.
In 2017 they bring in Vega, their high-end enthusiast grade cards.
Problem is, people are expecting high-end cards from AMD and Polaris and that's not the case, at least not by the things AMD have said themselves. And frankly truth be told AMD vs. Nvidia was always pretty much on-par, few frames here few frames there, there was never such a big gap in performance that one brand was clearly demolishing the other - however that's different for market share, where nvidia has the majority of the GPU segment, but that has little to do with the actual GPU performance, because even in the HD5000 era, where AMD was roasting Nvidia on a stake, because the performance of AMD cards was really really huge compared to anything from Nvidia, people were still buying Nvidia cards, which means that AMDs marketing game is just bad, nothing else.
That being said, AMDs problems aren't from their GPU segment, they stem from their CPU problems, that's where the big money is being made and that's where AMD is lacking. If AMD steps up their game with their CPU branch, and they become competitive again, that's where they'll make the bulk of their money. Compared to that the GPU market is peanuts, even if they'd hold ~80% of it, like Nvidia does currently.
GTX 1080 = GTX 980 replacement
GTX 1070 = GTX 970 replacement
Polaris 10A (480) = R9 380 replacement
Polaris 10B (480x) = R9 380x replacement
and maybe they'll have lower samples too which will replace the R7 370/R9 270 and 360/260 cards.
They aren't bringing their R9 390/390x & Fury replacements out, that's Vega.
Disclaimer: Speculation.
I'll be grabbing a 490X when it comes out (as long as they perform well enough, the 1070 may be a better value), if nothing else to keep heat down, my old 7990 puts out too much heat, my PC room is a hell of a lot warmer than the rest of my house - and with how little power these new GPUs use, should see much lower temps.
If you are talking about 480/480x.
But if they plan to release 490/490x too (which, afaik, they do) staying on 390x levels would be a huge dissappointment (and fuck lower power consumption)Need to see real benchmarks to see if Pascal caught up.
And its advantage, not "advantage".There you have 1070 for not that much more, which is PRed to be "faster than Titanium X" (most people wouldn't realize "at certain things in VR").
I mean, in the end it will depend on the tone of the reviewers. As such card would be either/or:
a) amazing value, very low power consumption, can bring you 1080p VR, NVs products still not fast enough for 4k, yeehaa!
b) slower than 970 which is only 79$ more expensive
From what I recall, most reviewers, and TPU in particular, will go with option B. And there go AMD sales...Yeah, like 1070 being much faster than TX, oh wait...
There is no hype whatsoever around Polaris.
Back in Early March, AMD demoed a Polaris 10 GFX running the new Hitman game in DX12 mode at 2k on "highest settings". The performance was consistently above 60 fps. The Polaris 10 card that was demoed back then was the pro card, not the XT, because GDDR5X started mass production in mid March, so it wasn't available then.
The only AMD cards that score above 60fps are the 390X, Fury and FuryX. This means that Polaris 10 Pro is at least as fast as the 390X. That is an excellent performance level for a ~230mm^2 chip running at ~1GHz.
I think AMD has done an good job with Polaris and have fixed many of the bottlenecks that were present in the original GCN micro-architecture. We're talking about a card that has 80% (36/44) of the SP resources of the 390X and similar clocks speeds. That's at least a 25% increase in shader efficiency going from Hawaii to Polaris. I expect the Polaris 10 XT to get dangerously close to the FuryX.
1) 480
2) 480x
3) 490
4) 490x
?