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RajaAMD

After months of speculation, AMD finally revealed its own adjacent-generation GPU at Computex 2022 this week. The new RX 480 is a midrange card that AMD claims will deliver dramatic functioning improvements in VR and 3D gaming. It'due south all office of AMD's overall strategy to reduce the cost of buying into the VR ecosystem, while improving their competitive positioning against Nvidia'due south 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 x compages. The RX480 will pack ii,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 retentivity autobus and either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 depending on the SKU. Board ability is 150W and the launch price is $199. Anandtech estimates a clock range between 1.08GHz and 1.3GHz to reach AMD's stated >5TFLOPS metric.

Polaris5

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 upwardly by 182GB/s of memory bandwidth. Nosotros don't know how many TMUs or ROPS the RX 480 will take, but memory bandwidth should be much higher, at 256GB/s (the RX 480 has 8Gbps GDDR5 retentiveness and a 256-bit memory autobus).

Polaris-ThreeQuarter

I persistent rumor we've heard is that AMD'south Polaris desktop GPUs would match or beat the R9 390's functioning at roughly one-half the TDP. That seems quite achievable based on the RX 480's cadre count (two,304 versus 2,560 on the R9 390), likely college clock speed, improved efficiency, and retention pinch improvements that were introduced in GCN 1.2 and likely further improved with Polaris' fourth-generation GCN compages. Overall performance will probable 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 improve power consumption.

There are some questions about full GPU efficiency since the RX 450 is rated for 150W, simply doesn't seem to offer as much performance as the GTX 1070, which also carries a 150W TDP — only a board's TDP rating isn't always an accurate illustration of its average power consumption. Historically, AMD's TDP ratings have tended to refer to the maximum power a design could depict rather than a real-earth metric of how much ability they typically consume. We'll have to wait and test the GPU before we can say much about its power efficiency compared to other AMD GPUs or Nvidia products.

Like Nvidia, AMD is heavily talking upwards Polaris' performance improvements in VR, though the visitor hasn't unveiled details on this topic even so. AMD claims that its new $200 GPU can match the performance of $500 GPUs from the previous generations in VR, and the company's ambitious pricing should requite it a very strong foothold in the midrange market. Currently, Nvidia'south $199 GPU would exist the GTX 960. Anandtech's Demote allows the states to compare different GPUs against each other, and while there'due south no entry for the R9 290 in last years' database, nosotros can compare the R9 390 against the GTX 960:

This is just a sample from the total comparing; y'all tin view the two cards head-to-head by clicking the link to a higher place. If AMD can evangelize R9 390 performance in a $199 GPU, it's going to have an enormous border over the GTX 960. Patently Nvidia will have a GTX 1060 at some point, but AMD wants to stake out a strong position in this space, and information technology looks like they've got a potent GPU to exercise it with.

We'll have more details and actual performance numbers on July 29. Stay tuned.