Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199

[Seanspeed]

This is the only place where people complain about prices and Gibbo actually cares enough to answer -
I don't even understand the concept of gouging when regardless of the product is still a company trying to make money.

The term 'price gouging' has honestly been highly watered down on here lately. I'm guilty of using it on occasion, but I think we should remember that true price gouging is generally more extreme than the small price hikes we're talking about here.

 

[fs123]

a 390 is twice as fast as your current card.

I had a 290x before I sold it while waiting for the new gen cards. The 7950 is my spare card. I might go for a non-reference 480 but if it is just 390/970 level then maybe I'll wait a bit longer or buy a used 390X or similar.

 

[JoeF1]

Nail on head!

I have a load of FREESYNC deals going live today.

RX-480 plus a sub £200 FREESYNC monitor is truly an incredible way to get silky smooth tear free gaming at sub £400, even £300 is nearly possible (RX-480 plus 22" FREESYNC), this is vastly less then say buying a 970/980 with a G-Sync monitor.

This is where AMD easily wins due to how much better value Freesync monitors are compared to G-sync.

Yep, pretty much selling this to me now.

 

[PhoenixUK]

So.... given i'm running on internal Intel HD graphics... should I go for an RX480 wait for the 980 prices to drop as a result

Same here. Had 960 for 3 weeks then returned it. I think 480 4gb or if I can nab a 2nd hand 970 for £120 then that would be perfect for 1200p. No reason to splash more than 200 on GPU IMHO as it's better to just upgrade in a year or so instead if required.

 

[fs123]

MSI Gaming X..Looks legit but who knows...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4qeriw/msi_rx_480_gaming_x_spotted/

Looks nice.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

I think in a theoretical sense, Gsync has a tiny edge, but in practical terms: none.

Plus Freesync is open and, imo, almost certainly the future. Nvidia are going to have to start supporting Freesync in the next few years or it's going to hurt their sales. And once they start supporting Freesync there is very little reason to keep trying to get the market to make Gsync this pervasive thing that everyone has to pay them for.

In practicle terms G-Sync still has one major advantage over FreeSync; it can work in windowed and borderless windowed mode. FreeSync cannot.

It's a real shame, as in fullscreen both are awesome, but as a multi monitor user I usually play in borderless window mode.

 

[faceman123]

970 performance lol

 

[cib24]

If both perform similar, 970 winning some, RX-480 winning others, I suspect most people will go RX-480 as it is like a newborn baby, GCN is great for improving in performance over time.

AMD proved this, 390 struggled to keep up with 970, whereas now a 390 can comfortably challenge and beat a 970 as they gain well with driver updates due to GCN.

RX-480 will see similar gains, it also is more optimised for DX12 and of course its price point is aggressive and its other benefit is the low power and no requirement for PSU upgrade.

Our 390 pricing is extremely aggressive but they are nearly all gone, once 390/390X is cleared the RX-480 will be the clear go to card in the £200 bracket, with only the 970 competing at present. 1060 is too much an unknown, it should compete but the price could be £200 and it could also be £300, only time will tell.

Super underrated post. Listen to this man he has the right idea.

I held onto my 7970 since 2011 (eventually crossfired in 2014) and it's performance continuously improved over time as AMD's GCN drivers matured (which is a large reason why it took me so long to upgrade). You can't say the same about a lot of Nvidia cards and their driver support over time (although I will admit they typically are quicker out of the box and definitely more power efficient).

Hopefully the RX-480 is somewhere between 390 and Nano performance on average right now, and I would expect it to improve quite a bit over time given the plethora of new features being incorporated into this card which will be optimised further as drivers mature (and will be added to Vega and everything else from AMD going forward).

 

[Marine-RX179]

I think in a theoretical sense, Gsync has a tiny edge, but in practical terms: none.

Plus Freesync is open and, imo, almost certainly the future. Nvidia are going to have to start supporting Freesync in the next few years or it's going to hurt their sales. And once they start supporting Freesync there is very little reason to keep trying to get the market to make Gsync this pervasive thing that everyone has to pay them for.

The benefit of Gsync monitor is the higher refresh rate at 1440 res, but it doesn't mean much in real world usage without having graphic set up at at least beyond 390/970 level (due to frame rate would only be hovering between 30-75fps and not higher), or may be in non-graphic demanding games like CS:GO etc.

 

[yoyo59]

970 performance lol

like I said days ago

 

[~>Dg<~]

seen a review just now amd 480 vs a 970 custom and the 970 beat it in every game.so its as quick as a stock 970 gtx.

 

[PhoenixUK]

970 performance lol

What's so funny about that? New featers, better performance, less price?

Prefer nVidia approach with 1070? More money, less performance than 980ti. LOLOLOLOL

 

[harney]

Thx for the replies guys re syncs

 

[FoxEye]

Anyone else slightly suspicious of all the new posters (<50 posts), telling us to BUY BUY BUY the 480? Best Thing Ever Edition?

I do wonder.

 

[RavenXXX2]

970 can clock to 980 performance, hopefully the 480 has the same headroom.

 

[faceman123]

like I said days ago

Hype train emergency e vac.

 

[cib24]

The benefit of Gsync monitor is the higher refresh rate at 1440 res, but it doesn't mean much in real world usage without having graphic set up at at least beyond 390/970 level (due to frame rate would only be hovering between 30-75fps and not higher), or may be in non-graphic demanding games like CS:GO etc.

Is that true though? I'm not exactly an expert on the two techs but my BenQ Xl2730z supports 40-144hz at 1440p. Does Gsync have a wider range than that? I would assume if my monitor was one of those capable of 160hz then it would support up to that level.

 

[drunkenmaster]

If both perform similar, 970 winning some, RX-480 winning others, I suspect most people will go RX-480 as it is like a newborn baby, GCN is great for improving in performance over time.

AMD proved this, 390 struggled to keep up with 970, whereas now a 390 can comfortably challenge and beat a 970 as they gain well with driver updates due to GCN.

RX-480 will see similar gains, it also is more optimised for DX12 and of course its price point is aggressive and its other benefit is the low power and no requirement for PSU upgrade.

Our 390 pricing is extremely aggressive but they are nearly all gone, once 390/390X is cleared the RX-480 will be the clear go to card in the £200 bracket, with only the 970 competing at present. 1060 is too much an unknown, it should compete but the price could be £200 and it could also be £300, only time will tell.

There are a lot of new architecture features on the RX 480 that will only be utilised on newer games where as the 970, and the 1070/1080 for that matter have very few DX12 specific features to gain performance from in future games.

Fury X, even Hawaii has hardware that gives it an advantage in DX12 over Nvidia architectures, RX480 has another whole new set of features on top of that by the looks of it. A year, even 6 months from now, maybe even a couple games before then could utilise features RX480 has that no other cards do and push it significantly beyond a 980. Look at the few games where a 390x goes from competing with a 980 to competing with a 980ti in DX12. RX480 will likely gain even more in those specific titles and more DX12 titles are likely to show that level of performance gain over time.

Another key thing to think about, Pascal(outside of the GP100) offers extremely few new hardware features and nothing that seems to gain on DX12 performance compared to Maxwell. Effectively the entire die is being utilised today in current games, which is useful but worth keeping in mind. There was effectively in the past die space taken up by features on AMD cards that at launch were taking power but not actually helping performance, but 6 months, a year, 2 and 3 years later being used and improving performance. Effectively RX480 will be underutilised at launch where 1080 is effectively at it's peak. Either every new game that comes out, game devs will utilised new features on the RX480 and performance will improve but this won't happen on the 1080. We've seen it generation after generation with AMD. Their architectures are forward thinking and push game devs to use newer more advanced features.

I'm not particularly saying what Nvidia are doing is bad, just a different strategy... though I will say this, if both companies made architectures with no forward thinking architecture at all and purely for performance in current games, I think the drive forward towards new effects and features would be slow to non existent.

Without DX12 features being in GCN... we would have had no Mantle, no Vulkan, no DX12. AMD pushed for these because they needed the API industry to move forwards to better utilise their architectures. But on that note, Vulkan and DX12 being available already means there is already the API infrastructure there to enable devs to utilise these hardware features much much quicker on Polaris/Vega than with Tahiti/Hawaii/Tonga/Fury.

 

[Aretak]

Anyone else slightly suspicious of all the new posters (<50 posts), telling us to BUY BUY BUY the 480? Best Thing Ever Edition?

I do wonder.

Plenty of "new" posters coming in to bash it too and has been for weeks. Even a few obvious sockpuppet accounts with """hilarious""" names. I guess you notice what you want to notice.

 

[Dicehunter]

First 480 review -