AMD announces its first GPU under Polaris architecture, which is the Radeon RX 480 at $199. (Photo : YouTube/TechnoWin)
Nvidia played the Pascal card in May with the release of its high-end GeForce GTX 1080 and subsequently unveiled the GTX 1070. All the attention turned to AMD with its first product based on the new Polaris architecture - the Radeon RX 480.
Expectations are high on the RX 480, with the manufacturer initially placing it as a new, mainstream entry for Virtual Reality (VR) experience. The GPU's performance is within the GTX 970 or 980 profiles with more reviews pegging the RX 480 closer to Nvidia's GTX 970.
However, since the 4 GB variant of AMD's RX 480 costs just $200, there is no call for alarm. The card is the single fastest mainstream to hit the market at the lowest price. AMD is not set to holdup the high-end low-value market the way Nvidia is doing with its GTX 1070 and 1080, according to Gamingbolt.
With reference to the good old days of the HD 4870, AMD is doubling down on the majority market, where it has conventionally been its most competitive. While there is yet an actual dual-GPU RX 480 SKU, the manufacturer is introducing Crossfired RX 480s as a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia GTX 1080.
With regard to specs, the RX 480 sport 36 Compute Units, 144 TMUs, 2304 Shader Processing Units, and 32 ROPs. Furthermore, the GPU comes with GDDR5 memory by Samsung over a 256-bit bus interface, offering a cumulative bandwidth of 256 GB/s.
AMD's Radeon RX 480 is clocked at 1266 MHz, while memory is clocked at actual 2000 MHz, or GDDR5-effective 8 GHz. It is reported that that GPU crank out up to 5.83 TFLOPS of compute functionality.
New CrossFire levels posted at Chiphell show that the Radeon RX 480 core clocks could be increased by 22 MHz to 1288 MHz. with regard to the GPU-Z graphs, the clocks are very stable when the cards are pushed to their temperature limits, with the primary CF card hitting 87 °C and the secondary 82 °C.
Besides the temperature resilience, YouTube user GGPC (Good Gaming PC) posted benchmark clips displaying the AMD Radeon RX 480 running video games complete with frame counters. Some of the game on the RX 480 include "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," "Doom," "Overwatch," "Counter-Strike: GO," and "Grand Theft Auto V." The card's performance is considerably steady similar to that of a GTX 980.
Watch the footage below for more information on AMD Radeon RX 480.
