The AMD Radeon RX 480 Preview: Polaris Makes Its Mainstream Mark
by Ryan Smith on June 29, 2016 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
So with the basics of the architecture and core configuration behind us, let’s dive into some numbers.
Overall, AMD is pitching the RX 480 as a card suitable for 1440p gaming as well as 1080p gaming and VR gaming. In the case of 1080p the card is clearly powerful enough, as even Crysis 3 at its highest quality setting is flirting with 60fps. However when it comes to 1440p, the RX 480 feels like it’s coming up a bit short; other than DiRT Rally, performance is a bit low for the 60fps PC gamer. Traditionally cards in the $199-$249 mainstream range have been 1080p gaming cards, and in the long run I think this is where RX 480 will settle at as well.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
449 Comments
View All Comments
Meteor2 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Well, if you only want to spend $100 on the CPU and $199 on the GPU, I can...Hrel - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Yeah, I can afford better. Sorry you can't yet, keep working at it!fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Arrogance doesn't play well here Captain GiantWallet. Price is a consideration for 99.9% of consumers, STFU with your one-person use case.praeses - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Seems like the RX480 should have only come with 8ghz 4GB of ram which would have yielded a slight power efficiency increase and cost reduction to move from 6pin/6phase to 8 and a better cooler. 6 should have been left for the RX470. I think marketing must have got in the way again.fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
GDDR5X is still expensive. At $200 some concessions had to be made, nothing to do with marketing.tipoo - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Unfortunately for AMD, they're on completely different fabs this time than Nvidia, Glofo vs tsmc. I've wondered if that's part of their efficiency disadvantage. We've seen this with the 6S load testing. That's the thing now, with different fabs, the playing field is not even, and not only does the architecture matter, but the fab process does too when comparing them to Nvidia. Which kind of sucks for AMD.With the iPhone it mattered less because it's mostly idle, even with the screen on, but for a high performance GPU it's the full throttle aspect that matters.
Interesting though that TSMC will still make their high end parts (I don't know if that means just Vega, or the 300 dollar Polaris too), so maybe it's not all lost on the efficiency side if the fabs are to blame.
I think this is to fuffil the WSA, makes sense, higher end part gets the higher end fab, the 200 dollar part isn't particularly efficient but they hit this performance and price.
They even switched Zen to TSMC after Glofo efficiency concerns.
So I do have hope that the more expensive TSMC parts will provide them much needed efficiency to go up against Nvidias higher end, and hopefully it doesn't mean Polaris as a whole is just inefficient.
T1beriu - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
1. The $300 Polaris is AIB RX480. There are no faster Polaris chips coming confirmed by Raja.2. Zen will not be built by TSMC. This was a fake rumor. GloFlo announced they're working on Zen. Source: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/217664-global...
3. A couple of months back TSMC released the list of partners building chips on 16nm. AMD wasn't on that list.
vladpetric - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
It seems to me that the leadership of AMD still doesn't get it that "drivers matter" ... While NVidia does not generally make more computationally powerful cards, they spend a lot of resources on good drivers.AMD as we know it today is the marriage of two hardware-first companies (old AMD and ATI). The sad part is that after losing a lot of marketshare, market cap, etc over the last decade, good software is still a second class concern for them.
K_Space - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
I'm not sure what world you've been living on but RTG drivers have been head & shoulder above anything ATI or even 'old AMD Radeon' delivered. Even old GCN cards continue to benefit from these long after their sell by date.tynopik - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
pg1: comfortable reach it > comfortably