AMD Radeon RX 480 Graphics Card With Polaris 10 Leaked – 5.5 TFLOPs Compute, 8 GB GDDR5 Memory

Mikeha

AMD Radeon RX 480 Graphics Card Confirmed – 5.5 TFLOPs Compute, Powered by a Single 6-Pin Connector

The AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card will be unveiled by AMD in under 10 hours at their live Computex press conference. The leaked specifications however give us a preview of what to expect from the upcoming Polaris graphics card. First of all, we are looking at a graphics card whose sole purpose is to deliver premium AAA and VR gaming at 1440P resolution. This graphics card will be available at a very nice price point around $249 US as the slide points out.

AMD Radeon RX 480 “Preliminary” Specifications:

WCCF	AMD Radeon RX 480	AMD Radeon R9 380X	AMD Radeon RX 460	AMD Radeon R7 260X
GPU	Polaris 10	Tonga XT	Polaris 11	Bonaire XT
Fabrication Process	14nm FinFET	28nm	14nm FinFET	28nm
Compute Units	32	32	14	14
GCN Generation	GCN 4.0	GCN 3.0	GCN 4.0	GCN 2.0
Stream Processors	2048	2048	896	896
Clock Speed	~1350Mhz	970Mhz	~1400Mhz	1100Mhz
Performance	5.5 TFLOPS	4.0 TFLOPS	2.5 TFLOPS	2.0 TFLOPS
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory	8GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
TDP	~110-135W	190W	<50W	115W
Price	$199-$249 US	$229 US	$109-$139 US	$139 US

Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-10-graphics-card-leak/#ixzz4AFyXqbzp

Quizzical

I expect there to be multiple desktop bins of both Polaris 10 and 11, as well as laptop versions of both--and likely several laptop bins of Polaris 11.  I've seen a lot of contradictory numbers thrown around on specs, so we really don't know what they'll be.

Mikeha

AMD just confirmed the price of the 480 will be $199. 

Over 5 TFOPS and made for VR. 

Quizzical

AMD says 36 compute units, not 32.  As 2048 is not a multiple of 36, it's not 2048 shaders.  2304 (= 64 x 36) would be a good guess.  AMD also says 150 W, though that's probably a PowerTune cap, not a "sometimes it will use this amount and sometimes more".  They're still not talking about clock speeds, other than to say over 5 TFLOPS.  They also said there will be both 4 GB and 8 GB versions; it's likely that $200 will be for the 4 GB version.

The announced launch date is June 29.  We'll see if it's a hard launch.  Paper launches on $200 cards aren't very common, but then, it's not very common for a $200 card to be the first in your new lineup.

SlyLoK

Recore said:

AMD just confirmed the price of the 480 will be $199. 

Over 5 TFOPS and made for VR. 

Dang. That is one heck of a deal! AMD seems to be targeting the midland market , mobile and consoles. That should treat them very well I think.

pantaro

now all my friends who are always like my pc cant run that can stop making excuses! lol

Quizzical

AMD has promised that Polaris will be 2.5x the energy efficiency of 28 nm GCN.  If you go by TFLOPS and TDP for your efficiency rating, 2.5x the efficiency of the original Radeon HD 7970 would give you about 5.7 TFLOPS for 150 W.  Of course, if that's how you do efficiency computations, the Radeon R9 Fury is already double the efficiency of the 7970, and Polaris 10 would only offer another 25% on top of that.

There will surely be several bins of Polaris 10, with multiple bins for desktop and at least one for laptop.  If even the laptop Polaris 10 is over 5 TFLOPS, the top bin could push close to a GTX 1070.  If the 5 TFLOPS number only means the top bin sometimes gets there at max turbo while otherwise throttling a lot, then that's much less impressive.  We'll have to see how it plays out.

filmoret

You can watch the stream which is over but its still up.

filmoret

Oh nice did you see the AMD graphics card running faster then the GTX1080 and using half the energy?  And it cost 200$ less.  Yea they have made it clear they focused on VR graphics chips.  I saw something about them making something comparable to the i7 chips but didn't quite grasp it.  Looked like they made something better then i7.

Mikeha

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centkin

It is very nice to see AMD competing in video cards.  Now if they could only do that to Intel with CPUs. 

This might force Nvidia to lower their pricing on the 1070 and 1080.  It will be an interesting holiday season this year on the PC graphics front.

DKLond

I'd like to see it before I believe it - but cool if true.

Hrimnir

Here is what Anandtech posted (http://www.anandtech.com/show/10389/amd-teases-radeon-rx-480-launching-june-29th-for-199):

"First off, the RX 480 will include 36 CUs. If we assume 64 stream processors to a CU – the GCN standard – then this brings us to 2304 SPs. AMD has not named the specific Polaris GPU being used here, but given the CU count I believe it’s reasonable to assume that this is a Polaris 10 SKU, as I’ve already seen Polaris 11 and it’s a very small chip better suited for notebooks."

AMD Radeon GPU Specification Comparison
	AMD Radeon RX 480	AMD Radeon R9 390X	AMD Radeon R9 390	AMD Radeon R9 380
Stream Processors	2304 (36 CUs)	2816 (44 CUs)	2560 (40 CUs)	1792 (28 CUs)
Texture Units	(Many)	176	160	112
ROPs	(A Positive Integer)	64	64	32
TFLOPs (FMA)	>5 TFLOPs	5.9 TFLOPs	5.1 TFLOPs	3.5 TFLOPs
Boost Clock	>1.08GHz	1050MHz	1000MHz	970MHz
Memory Clock	8Gbps GDDR5	5Gbps GDDR5	5Gbps GDDR5	5.5Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	512-bit	512-bit	256-bit
VRAM	4GB/8GB	8GB	8GB	2GB
Transistor Count	?	6.2B	6.2B	5.0B
Typical Board Power	150W	275W	275W	190W
Manufacturing Process	GloFo 14nm FinFET	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	GCN 4	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.2
GPU	Polaris 10?	Hawaii	Hawaii	Tonga
Launch Date	06/29/16	06/18/15	06/18/15	06/18/15
Launch Price	$199	$429	$329	$199

acidblood

Nice benchmarks, but has AMD shaken the bad performance in certain games thing?

filmoret

acidblood said:

Nice benchmarks, but has AMD shaken the bad performance in certain games thing?

Found out there is a reason for that.  The games are being programmed to run bad on the AMD chips.  They recently did some things to allow coders to make their chips even more faster.  They made the coder's jobs easier.   But will Intel block them by using dirty tactics?  You have to realize that Intel and Nvidia both want AMD to fail.  Its not the chips fault the programmers didn't optimize their games properly.  And believe it or not they have to be optimized for each manufacturer, its not just some universal language.

Leon1e

Eh I expected HBM 2.0 or gddr5x. Will hold onto my 290X for the time being. Power consumption is not an issue to me. 

Malabooga

Actually NVdia Gameworks is the culprit. And not just on AMD cards (its just that it hits AMD more in performance) I have NVidia and have played most of Gameworks titles and i can say - absolutely not worth it. This guy summed up my opinion on it perfectly (and before you call him AMD fanboy or something similar, he has 980ti and has bought GTX1080 FE with his own money):

Mikeha

Leon1e said:

Eh I expected HBM 2.0 or gddr5x. Will hold onto my 290X for the time being. Power consumption is not an issue to me. 

That would be VEGA with HBM 2 rumored to be launching at the end of this year. 

Polaris is AMD's low end GPU and VEGA will be their high end GPU.

Quizzical

filmoret said:

Oh nice did you see the AMD graphics card running faster then the GTX1080 and using half the energy?  And it cost 200$ less.  Yea they have made it clear they focused on VR graphics chips.  I saw something about them making something comparable to the i7 chips but didn't quite grasp it.  Looked like they made something better then i7.

A Radeon RX 480 is not faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 apart from certain corner cases.  Those corner cases include pretty much anything that's really heavy on local memory usage, which is actually a lot of non-graphical compute tasks.  But not games.

Also, the card starts at $200, which is $500 less than $700.  So it's not $200 less.  It's a lot better than that.

Quizzical

acidblood said:

Nice benchmarks, but has AMD shaken the bad performance in certain games thing?

It's not possible to fix that when someone is writing code deliberately trying to hurt performance on your hardware, which is the entire point of Nvidia Gameworks.  Give me a decently modern GPU from AMD and another from Nvidia and I can easily make either one run ten times as fast as the other.  If nothing else, I can query the card vendor or model and give the two cards different code paths, with the card I want to sabotage given an insanely slow code path.

Quizzical

Leon1e said:

Eh I expected HBM 2.0 or gddr5x. Will hold onto my 290X for the time being. Power consumption is not an issue to me. 

AMD said in January that Polaris uses GDDR5.  Vega will use HBM2, but that's probably not coming until early next year.

filmoret

Quizzical said:

filmoret said:

Oh nice did you see the AMD graphics card running faster then the GTX1080 and using half the energy?  And it cost 200$ less.  Yea they have made it clear they focused on VR graphics chips.  I saw something about them making something comparable to the i7 chips but didn't quite grasp it.  Looked like they made something better then i7.

A Radeon RX 480 is not faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 apart from certain corner cases.  Those corner cases include pretty much anything that's really heavy on local memory usage, which is actually a lot of non-graphical compute tasks.  But not games.

Also, the card starts at $200, which is $500 less than $700.  So it's not $200 less.  It's a lot better than that.

I guess they were using dual RX 480's for the demonstration.  Which makes me wonder if they were showing the power usage from both cards or just one of the cards compared to the 1080.  But even with dual cards its considerably cheaper.

Quizzical

filmoret said:

Quizzical said:

filmoret said:

Oh nice did you see the AMD graphics card running faster then the GTX1080 and using half the energy?  And it cost 200$ less.  Yea they have made it clear they focused on VR graphics chips.  I saw something about them making something comparable to the i7 chips but didn't quite grasp it.  Looked like they made something better then i7.

A Radeon RX 480 is not faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 apart from certain corner cases.  Those corner cases include pretty much anything that's really heavy on local memory usage, which is actually a lot of non-graphical compute tasks.  But not games.

Also, the card starts at $200, which is $500 less than $700.  So it's not $200 less.  It's a lot better than that.

I guess they were using dual RX 480's for the demonstration.  Which makes me wonder if they were showing the power usage from both cards or just one of the cards compared to the 1080.  But even with dual cards its considerably cheaper.

That's assuming that CrossFire scaling works flawlessly.  Which it often doesn't.

Malabooga

filmoret said:

Quizzical said:

filmoret said:

Oh nice did you see the AMD graphics card running faster then the GTX1080 and using half the energy?  And it cost 200$ less.  Yea they have made it clear they focused on VR graphics chips.  I saw something about them making something comparable to the i7 chips but didn't quite grasp it.  Looked like they made something better then i7.

A Radeon RX 480 is not faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 apart from certain corner cases.  Those corner cases include pretty much anything that's really heavy on local memory usage, which is actually a lot of non-graphical compute tasks.  But not games.

Also, the card starts at $200, which is $500 less than $700.  So it's not $200 less.  It's a lot better than that.

I guess they were using dual RX 480's for the demonstration.  Which makes me wonder if they were showing the power usage from both cards or just one of the cards compared to the 1080.  But even with dual cards its considerably cheaper.

It was crossfire and they didbt show power usage, but 480 should use 110-130W, 1080 uses 180-ish

Ridelynn

June 29

Id like to see some benches other than AotS, reserving judgement.

Although at this point, if that price point isn't some fine print caveat and there is actual
availabilty on June 29 - it looks promising.