AMD Announces the RX 480 Graphics Card at $199

AMD has officially announced their first graphics card based on their Polaris architecture, it is the Radeon RX 480. AMD’s goal with this card is not to be the fastest card out there, but to bring VR to the masses. Besides the cost of the VR headset gamers need to shell out at least $350 for a premium graphics card just to meet the minimum requirements for VR. AMD says that the $199 Radeon RX 480 will deliver “VR capability common in $500 GPUs”.

AMD Radeon RX 480

Looking at the specifications of the card AMD says that it will have over 5 TFLOPS of single-precision performance and 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The card has 36 Compute Units, which would mean it has 2304 Stream Processors. The card also supports either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 across a 256-bit interface. The card will only have a 150W TDP as well.

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AMD says that moving to the 14nm FinFET process gave them a 1.7x performance per watt gain, and with added AMD Technologies there is a gain of up to 2.8x performance / watt.

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Now this card is not made to compete with the NVIDIA’s latest GeForce GTX 1080, at least not by itself. AMD showed a demo of Ashes of Singularity running on a GTX 1080 and two RX 480’s in CrossFire. The result was the two cards outperforming the GTX 1080. The kicker here is that a dual RX 480 costs less than a GTX 1080. It looks like AMD could be making a big push for CrossFire, let’s hope they really put some effort into supporting it and working with game developers on it. Because we all know that CrossFire support in the past has been pretty bad.

AMD Radeon RX 480

So that is the AMD Radeon RX 480. We will have more details on the card when they become available.

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