AMD Radeon RX 480 Designed To Bring VR To The Budget-Strapped Masses

[TJ Hooker]

@chessgeek that seems unlikely. With a single six pin connector you only have 150 W total available to the board. I doubt they're going to release a card with only enough power connectors to exactly meet the TDP without a watt to spare. An 8 pin connector makes much more sense.

 

[jaber2]

I am sure it will beat any 1070 and 1080 on Ashes of the Singularity, but lets test it on games we actually play

 

[kiniku]

None of this will touch Pascal. In the meantime Nvidia is now working on their Ti derivative which will probably be an HBM2 product.

 

[zzzxtreme]

I don't quite get it. Are they saying it is equals to gtx970 performance? Or even gtx980?

 

[cmi86]

Hey this looks fantastic, were talking 390/970 performance for $200 bucks. I can't really remember the last time a $200 MSRP GPU was considered to be fast and effective at resolutions greater than 1080P. The only people trying to trash on this are NV fanbois that know green will have nothing to offer at this price point. They will probably end up having to slash prices on the slightly faster 1070 or release a 1060Ti that is basically a cut down 1070 because 1060 at >75W will not compete. And remember folks this is the low end of Polaris and already proposing implications on Nvidias mainstream high end product (GTX-1070) If this is any indication of the high end to come from AMD, Nvidia sandbagging a Ti version of their flagship like always may not be enough to keep the crown.

 

[neblogai]

RX480 at two hundred dollars is the bottom price and will not come with 36 CUs- it will have 32. Probably,
cheap 6000-7000 memory too. It will be at 1266x2048x2= 5.18TFOPS - which
as indicated is >5TFLOPS. 2048 SP at 1350MHz is 5.5TFLOPs as in the
RX480 slide from May.
36CU model with 8GB 8000MHz memory will be somewhere at $250-$300, and there we still don't know where all 40CU chips are- maybe meant for GDDR5X or APPLE

 

[rush21hit]

None of this will touch Pascal. In the meantime Nvidia is now working on their Ti derivative which will probably be an HBM2 product.

Polaris 10 and 11 were meant for mainstream market. Meaning $100>200 range. I suspect Polaris would even go at entry level, the sub $100 range. I also expect Polaris eventually gets embedded to AMD's APU, along with Zen.

Your comparison will be a very good question once nVidia release the GTX1060 as Pascal's mainstream card. For the top end for this generation AMD has planned Vega, which will came with HBM2 that supposedly will challenge high-end Pascal. Yes, including the 1080Ti. Perhaps the Pascal's Titan as well. At this point, who knows.

Expect Vega based chip somewhere above $300 price range. And as usual from both sides, high end segment by each generation almost always came with the latest near-experimental innovation that will also carried out or gets better on the next gen beyond. Well, some stuff that were deemed good-enough gets re-branded now and then, but still. And now, D5X vs HBM2 is an interesting proposition for high end cards. Who knows what's next.

Since people that actually buy those ultra high end GPU are so few, it's more like bragging rights. Not many people, at this speed of innovation for PC tech, could justify any more than $200 for a GPU. At least not for a tech savvy ones. Including myself.

imho, AMD has made a wise move to gain attention on this segment first. Still, I can't pull the trigger unless I'm aware on how the GTX1060 would fare.

 

[jbc029]

The real coup here is that the 480 finishes removing *all* maxwell cards from recommendations.

The 1070 gutted the product line for anything 980 and above (because it's cheaper and performs just as well or better than all of it). The 480 took care of the rest (970 performance for 960 price). In less than two months, Maxwell, Fury and Hawaii have become completely irrelevant.

 

[Shankovich]

The wait between now and June 29th is not going to help AMD. That's a blunder as it gives NV plenty of time to get all the data they can through their sources and prepare their response. Whether that's lowering prices on Maxwell cards or getting a new card out.

Like what? TFLOPS is an ok indication and it's close to the 1070 which is $179 more expensive. nVidia can't afford to make the 1060 $200 considering how close the 480 is to the 1070, but they're going to have to at the very least. That, and the1080 is going to need a price reduction, especially of 480's in crossfire consistently match it.

 

[TJ Hooker]

The wait between now and June 29th is not going to help AMD. That's a blunder as it gives NV plenty of time to get all the data they can through their sources and prepare their response. Whether that's lowering prices on Maxwell cards or getting a new card out.

Like what? TFLOPS is an ok indication and it's close to the 1070 which is $179 more expensive. nVidia can't afford to make the 1060 $200 considering how close the 480 is to the 1070, but they're going to have to at the very least. That, and the1080 is going to need a price reduction, especially of 480's in crossfire consistently match it.

Eh, FLOPS is a pretty poor measure of gaming performance, especially when comparing different architectures. If you look at R9 380 vs GTX 960, the 380 is ~50% more powerful in terms of FLOPS, but performs at most 10% better on average. This card isn't going to be competing with the 1070.

 

[InvalidError]

And by that time the min spec for VR will be higher then the current 480 provides, and it will have been replaced by something faster anyway.

Not necessarily: lower-end VR kit may have lower resolution, lower refresh rates and would also be intended for people with lower system specs in general who won't mind having to tweak graphics details down a notch or two to get smoother game play.

Just like everything else, you only need uber-high-end GPU setups when you want to play with everything at Ultra and can get away with far less than that by dropping details a bit.

 

[mavikt]

Lol, I amazed how many people take (AMD) market slides for truth. I'd rather wait until Tom's does a proper test of the piece until I cast my verdict...

 

[Joe Black]

So we are forgetting the 1080 launched with DP 1.4 and HDR then? And I quote
'Not only does it have DisplayPort 1.3 support, but it is also the first card to support DisplayPort 1.4 with HDR.'

The 490 is still coming btw... I expect them to launch with 460,470,480 and 490. And who knows? Maybe even X versions. The range they mentioned is $100 to $300. We now know of only the $200 and $230 cards - 4/8GB memory 480.

Also the dual 480s running Ashes only hit about 50% utilisation. I would not even be surprised if they limited the frame rate via Crimson and had some quality settings off. How else to explain only 50% utilisation?

 

[blppt]

At $200 you could get two RX 480s or one founders edition 1070. Even if the performance isn't a huge leap it's hard to ignore the value.

Perhaps, but only *IF* AMD keeps up this recent promising slew of frequent driver updates, otherwise you'll be stuck using one card until they give you a solid CFX profile (which was 5+ full months in the case of Fallout 4, last hotfix FINALLY fixed CFX for me), or games make use of DX12's far better multi-gpu non-AFR technology.

Note that just because a game uses DX12 doesnt necessarily mean its using its new mGPU tech, the developers still have to add that feature to their engine.

I just hope this recent great, frequent driver updates from AMD is not just a blip---they really have me excited about using my two 290x(s) again.

 

[zzzxtreme]

Hey this looks fantastic, were talking 390/970 performance for $200 bucks. I can't really remember the last time a $200 MSRP GPU was considered to be fast and effective at resolutions greater than 1080P. The only people trying to trash on this are NV fanbois that know green will have nothing to offer at this price point. They will probably end up having to slash prices on the slightly faster 1070 or release a 1060Ti that is basically a cut down 1070 because 1060 at >75W will not compete. And remember folks this is the low end of Polaris and already proposing implications on Nvidias mainstream high end product (GTX-1070) If this is any indication of the high end to come from AMD, Nvidia sandbagging a Ti version of their flagship like always may not be enough to keep the crown.

How does it compare to gtx970 or gtx980?

 

[alidan]

There will be more affordable ones in the future. Prices on the current models are the early adopter premium, much like Google Glasses.

And by that time the min spec for VR will be higher then the current 480 provides, and it will have been replaced by something faster anyway.

currently there are devkit 2 clones for 2-300$ and that's good enough for most games,
room scale requires games to be ground up built for it, which isn't happening.

now, this is speculation on my part, but i think that nvidia is doing something like baking all the texture detail into a scene then changing camera positions, this is something you can do in blender that gives you a fully rendered environment that you can explore in real time, from the way nvidias way of doing vr was shown, i think its something similar where all the grunt work is done once and a very light pass is used to get both eyes, this will drive vr hardware cost down significantly on how much it taxes cpus and gpus, would be shocked if amd wasnt doing something similar.

but as vr is now, they have to scale back the graphics to get 90-120 fps across 2 viewports.

personally, im 100% fine with not having 3d, but being able to use my head as an access in games as most of what i want to play is cockpit games in vr

 

[joshyboy82]

And by that time the min spec for VR will be higher then the current 480 provides, and it will have been replaced by something faster anyway.

Not necessarily: lower-end VR kit may have lower resolution, lower refresh rates and would also be intended for people with lower system specs in general who won't mind having to tweak graphics details down a notch or two to get smoother game play.

Just like everything else, you only need uber-high-end GPU setups when you want to play with everything at Ultra and can get away with far less than that by dropping details a bit.

There isn't another Tier of VR. What we have will still be around on June 29th. People are just speculating for no practical purpose. I guess I should stop buying tires for my car, because in the future there won't be roads. NO ONE has announced a newer, higher resolution, faster response headset. You are buying a card for the VR games we currently have, and for the games that are currently in production.

 

[falchard]

What I wonder is if AMD plans to use multi-gpu to fill out the high end as they did in the HD3xxx and HD4xxx generation. DX12 plays a lot nicer for multi-gpu setups. Some engines even support a nVidia and AMD GPU working on the same game.

 

[Valantar]

I wish people would stop equating FLOPS with gaming performance. My Fury X performs 8,6 GFLOPS, which is way more than the 980Ti's 5,6, yet the Ti is faster in the majority of games. So please, listen to what they say, don't regurgitate semi-meaningless numbers. This should perform close to the GTX 980. It won't touch the 1070. However, for the price, this is amazing. More than 50% price drop for the same performance in one generation? Wow.

 

[Imz Deodex]

The real coup here is that the 480 finishes removing *all* maxwell cards from recommendations.

The 1070 gutted the product line for anything 980 and above (because it's cheaper and performs just as well or better than all of it). The 480 took care of the rest (970 performance for 960 price). In less than two months, Maxwell, Fury and Hawaii have become completely irrelevant.

Not completely. Yes the RX 480 will be replacing the 970, my 960 , 380 and 390 but let us not forget there are still a huge chunk of people there who wants to go lower. It would be really interesting to see a new contender for the GTX 750ti and GTX 950 for these are the really budget champs here for people who does not give a flying poop about VR but is still able to play at 1080p better than today's consoles could offer.

 

[Valantar]

The real coup here is that the 480 finishes removing *all* maxwell cards from recommendations.

The 1070 gutted the product line for anything 980 and above (because it's cheaper and performs just as well or better than all of it). The 480 took care of the rest (970 performance for 960 price). In less than two months, Maxwell, Fury and Hawaii have become completely irrelevant.

Not completely. Yes the RX 480 will be replacing the 970, my 960 , 380 and 390 but let us not forget there are still a huge chunk of people there who wants to go lower. It would be really interesting to see a new contender for the GTX 750ti and GTX 950 for these are the really budget champs here for people who does not give a flying poop about VR but is still able to play at 1080p better than today's consoles could offer.

Isn't that what Polaris 11 will be for?

 

[Valantar]

Do you have money sitting around wating to buy a new GPU the second it's announced? If yes - go do something fun while you wait. You can afford it. If not, then stop whining.

I've been eyeing a new video card for four months, but opted to wait to see what Polaris would bring to the table. I'm not disappointed and will be grabbing an early one when they're on the street. And the price point is right in my sweet spot -- I just can't justify spending more than $250 on a component that will be obsolete in two years.

Seeing how you're not one of the "Boo! Paper launch! Boo!" crowd, I can't argue with that

 

[InvalidError]

Isn't that what Polaris 11 will be for?

The official pitch for Polaris 11 is mobile-centric but there is supposed to be a 470 in there too.

 

[cmi86]

Hey this looks fantastic, were talking 390/970 performance for $200 bucks. I can't really remember the last time a $200 MSRP GPU was considered to be fast and effective at resolutions greater than 1080P. The only people trying to trash on this are NV fanbois that know green will have nothing to offer at this price point. They will probably end up having to slash prices on the slightly faster 1070 or release a 1060Ti that is basically a cut down 1070 because 1060 at >75W will not compete. And remember folks this is the low end of Polaris and already proposing implications on Nvidias mainstream high end product (GTX-1070) If this is any indication of the high end to come from AMD, Nvidia sandbagging a Ti version of their flagship like always may not be enough to keep the crown.

How does it compare to gtx970 or gtx980?

Well we won't know for sure until the card actually releases but based off of the information that is known about the RX 480 in addition to methodolgies that have been developed through previous generations of GCN to roughly calculate hypothetical performance the RX 480 should be significantly faster than a 970 and slightly faster or relatively equal to a 980.

 

[ManWithSword]

To bring 980 / 390 performance down to $199 in the RX 480 is astonishing. The article's title seems almost snobbish about people who can't afford to pay $700 for a graphics card, but AMD (and Sony with PSVR if they make it compatible with pc eventually) have helped to ensure that VR thrives as a mass consumer product and not simply live a short life as an ultra expensive niche product.