HiGame

After months of speculation, AMD finally revealed its own next-generation GPU at Computex 2016 this week. The new RX 480 is a midrange card that AMD claims will deliver dramatic performance improvements in VR and 3D gaming. It’s all part of AMD’s overall strategy to reduce the cost of buying into the VR ecosystem, while improving their competitive positioning against Nvidia’s midrange products.

The RX 480, which will ship on June 29, is a 14nm GPU built at GlobalFoundries. It’s a fourth-generation GCN card based on the Polaris 10 architecture. The RX480 will pack 2,304 GCN cores, which works out to 36 compute units. Its boost clock is above 1.08GHz and it’s backed by a 256-bit memory bus and either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 depending on the SKU. Board power is 150W and the launch price is $199. Anandtech estimates a clock range between 1.08GHz and 1.3GHz to achieve AMD’s stated >5TFLOPS metric.



The R9 380X is the toughest competition AMD has at the $199 price point (most of the GPUs in this bracket are R9 380s, but PowerColor has an R9 380X priced at $199). The R9 380X is a 2048:120:32 design (cores, texture units, and ROPS respectively) backed up by 182GB/s of memory bandwidth. We don’t know how many TMUs or ROPS the RX 480 will have, but memory bandwidth should be much higher, at 256GB/s (the RX 480 has 8Gbps GDDR5 memory and a 256-bit memory bus).

One persistent rumor we’ve heard is that AMD’s Polaris desktop GPUs would match or beat the R9 390’s performance at roughly half the TDP. That seems quite achievable based on the RX 480’s core count (2,304 versus 2,560 on the R9 390), likely higher clock speed, improved efficiency, and memory compression improvements that were introduced in GCN 1.2 and likely further improved with Polaris’ fourth-generation GCN architecture.*Overall performance will likely beat the R9 390 and approach the R9 390X, but at a much lower price (the cheapest R9 390X is currently $299 at Newegg) and vastly better power consumption.

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