Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199

AlamoX · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:12

Scougar said:
Thing is... who is going to buy this card exactly? I will because it will be an upgrade from the 380 4gb I have, but anyone with a 390 is likely to only get a side grade.

i have a 390 and im going to pick one, mostly because i am tired of 28nm and want the finfet, also want it for the extra features, and another 15-20% performance at stock isn't that bad especialy if i can overclock it further to Fury.
and because i think it will hold value much longer, so even if i want to sell it later on to get on vega, it would hardly lose 50€, beside the price/tdp/size/heat, makes it easy to crossfire later if i decide to.

AllBodies · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:14

I hope the Scorpio and PS4K are very similar to each other in power.

We don't want another repeat of them being quite different. And also the Scorpio is already pegged at ~1070 performance (also accounting for console optimisation probably more). So PC games should be held back less.

humbug · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:15

I think i'm going to be picking myself one up too, but not the instant they launch, not this time.

I'm going to take my time and think carefully about which one.

Mauller · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:16

Aretak said:
The Scorpio seems like it's based on Vega, as the specs offered are much more powerful than any Polaris chip we've seen. It's the PS4K that's using Polaris (apparently specced the same as the 480 in fact, but underclocked to ~900MHz). It's still the better part of 18 months away though.

it could end up clocked higher by the time of launch, process maturity and what not. unless they are trying to get away with a crud cooling solution. one interesting thing is that the Xbox one S appears to use a blower style cooler.

Scougar · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:16

Greebo said:
Depends if it overclocks.

It should perform better as well in directx 12 games plus drivers ill mature, latest tech, less power etc.

It could easily be the same decision 980ti owners have had to make, is it worth swapping for maybe 20% better performance????

Yeah, good point.

I'm likely to upgrade again to whatever Vega is, or possibly whatever Nvidia have as a competing product later down the line at that point. (Just hard to shift second hand stuff over here... I need an OcUK USA division!! lol).

AlamoX · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:19

humbug said:
I think i'm going to be picking myself one up too, but not the instant they launch, not this time.

I'm going to take my time and think carefully about which one.

Sapphire VaporX/Nitro for me, never bought reference and never will i think

Jono8 · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:22

humbug said:
Even the V-Cards auther admits that run was done on old drivers

Go back through the pages, Guru3D said later Polaris Drivers give it a significant performance boost.

The 3d mark links show the same driver version :confused:

SiDeards73 · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:22

AlamoX said:
Sapphire VaporX/Nitro for me, never bought reference and never will i think

Only Ref i had was the 290, never ever again lol.. Sapphire Vapor-X for me as well or if theres an extreme OC'd AIO version i'll have one of those

humbug · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:22

AlamoX said:
Sapphire VaporX/Nitro for me, never bought reference and never will i think

Yeah i like the Vapor-X but i hope it does look like that 'Showerhead' cooler thats been leaked.

The 290/X Vapor-X coolers were nice, a repaved version of those would be nice.

humbug · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:27

humbug said:
Yeah i like the Vapor-X but i hope it does look like that 'Showerhead' cooler thats been leaked.

The 290/X Vapor-X coolers were nice, a repaved version of those would be nice.

290X Vapor-X Stunning

Sapphire RX 480 leak. Cheap nasty nasty looking thing.

AllBodies · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:28

Yeah I always loved the look of the Vapor-X.

Maybe it'll make a return with Vega 11, assuming Vega 10 is watercooled like the Fury X.

harney · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:29

tbh said:
It was the most common card on Steam user surveys a few months ago but I very much doubt it's the best selling card in history, that honour probably goes to something cheap and terrible such as the GeForce 2 MX.

I am sure that steam survey does not cover all steam users i am sure i read that they take a percentage ....

Seanspeed · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:31

Toss3 said:
But for a new generation of cards it's pretty much the best you can achieve. Doubt any new card is going to capture 10% of the GPU market just like that. If we take consoles into consideration I bet amd is in the lead.

The point is that despite the 970's great success, it doesn't mean that the majority of PC gamers have 970-class cards or better. Far from it. So the answer to "Who is the 480 even for?" should become patently obvious.

I see you're far more interested in the Nvidia vs AMD aspect of this, which absolutely nobody was talking about. :rolleyes:

tbh said:
It was the most common card on Steam user surveys a few months ago

It was, and it only accounted for 5% of users, if I remember correctly.

Which should put into perspective how many users actually have cards at this level, given that any others equal or better will make up a good bit smaller percentage.

Davedree · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:36

Those coolers I think would be overkill for a single 6 pin gcard,
It would be like putting a powercolor 390 pcs cooler on a 7850.

Pulseammo · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:38

Does anyone know if ocuk still handles warranty for xfx? I saw they now did that service for Asus. Do they also do direct warranty for powercolor, I seem to have it in my mind they do but can't remember.

Mauller · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:38

humbug said:
Sapphire RX 480 leak. Cheap nasty nasty looking thing.

How does it look cheap and nasty? that 290x cooler looks ridiculous and overpriced for its job. That nitro appears to have a full metal cover over it and heatpipe based heatsink under it. Just simple and elegant. Also compact by the looks.

D.P. · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:40

Greebo said:
What we know for sure so far

1. AMD will release a 480 card on 29th June
2. The 4gb will cost $199 and the 8gb will be $239

What has a 95%+ chance of being true

1. Gibbo (ocuk) already has stock
2. The price might be £200 or it might be £250
3. There will be Beast cards from AIB which will cost more
4. They overclock

What may or may not be true

1. The card runs at 1.08Ghz or 1.266Ghz standard clocks
2. The card may just have base clocks or may boost like the 980/1080
3. The card may be slower than a 970 or as fast as a 1070
4. The card may overclock to 1.5Ghz on air or even 1.8Ghz on water and beat a none overclocked GTX1080. Or it may not overclock at all.
5. The card will be the second coming or the final nail in the coffin for AMD.

to add to the above AMD have released 2 official benchmarks for the 480:
1) the steam VR benchmark where it scores around 39/970 performance. But this benchmark is a little weird.
2) Ashes crossfire benchmark. lots of confusion and AMD themselves didn't even seem to know what they were talking about. The final conformation was the scores had a xfire scaling of 1.83X. If true the score would be around 390 performance.

Both those scores seem a little low compared to the known shader count. Something a little closer to 390X would be expected, but if the core speed is 1080MHZ and it boosts to 1266MHZ then the above are possibly correct performance figures.

There are AMD figures for the 470 and we know the 470 has about 12% less Compute units. So either there is a big processor speed then the 480 performance will be about 10% above the 470 numbers. Personally I would think there is a clock speed difference so maybe the 480 is 20% faster than the 470, which would tie in to the power difference.

karik666 · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:40

Mauller said:
How does it look cheap and nasty? that 290x cooler looks ridiculous and overpriced for its job. That nitro appears to have a full metal cover over it and heatpipe based heatsink under it. Just simple and elegant. Also compact by the looks.

I think it looks ok,plus most people wont even see the card once its in the case.

humbug · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:40

Davedree said:
Those coolers I think would be overkill for a single 6 pin gcard,
It would be like putting a powercolor 390 pcs cooler on a 7850.

Yeah, and, your point is?

Mauller said:
How does it look cheap and nasty? that 290x cooler looks ridiculous and overpriced for its job. That nitro appears to have a full metal cover over it and heatpipe based heatsink under it. Just simple and elegant.

Each to their own i guess

To me it looks like a showerhead, if it didn't have all those dots around it it wouldn't look half as bad, IMO

Mauller · 17 Jun 2016 at 18:42

D.P. said:
to add to the above AMD have released 2 official benchmarks for the 480:
1) the steam VR benchmark where it scores around 39/970 performance. But this benchmark is a little weird.
2) Ashes crossfire benchmark. lots of confusion and AMD themselves didn't even seem to know what they were talking about. The final conformation was the scores had a xfire scaling of 1.83X. If true the score would be around 390 performance.

Both those scores seem a little low compared to the known shader count. Something a little closer to 390X would be expected, but if the core speed is 1080MHZ and it boosts to 1266MHZ then the above are possibly correct performance figures.

There are AMD figures for the 470 and we know the 470 has about 12% less Compute units. So either there is a big processor speed then the 480 performance will be about 10% above the 470 numbers. Personally I would think there is a clock speed difference so maybe the 480 is 20% faster than the 470, which would tie in to the power difference.

i looked at that steam VR benchmark and one thing that sticks out in it is 'Low power vr' in big letters above the benchmark figures. So it could be the part at base clocks for that performance. (1080mhz) which seems reasonable. but without the talk that went with the slide then we don't understand the reasoning behind the slide.