AMD Radeon RX 480 Review

28nm GPUs stuck around for a good while – almost five years, in fact. Difficulties in shrinking beyond this level forced both AMD and Nvidia to improve performance and efficiency without the aid of a die shrink and Nvidia undoubtedly did a better job with its super efficient Maxwell architecture than AMD was able to with its refreshed Graphics Core Next products. Finally, however, the industry is moving on. Last month saw the introduction of the 16nm Pascal architecture from Nvidia with the release of the GTX 1080 swiftly followed by the GTX 1070, and now AMD is here with its 14nm Polaris architecture and the first graphics card to use it: the Radeon RX 480.

Widely reported to be a $199 part (exact pricing will vary depending on the SKU), the RX 480 is not looking to compete with any current Pascal parts. Instead, this is very much a mass market part, targeting those on a two or three year GPU upgrade cycle. AMD points out that, according to Steam, 95 percent of gamers are still playing at 1080p or below, and 84 percent only ever spend between $100 and $300 on GPU upgrades. Now, Nvidia will of course be aware of these facts too, and just when it decides to target this same market segment with Pascal remains to be seen, but success in this area is crucial for generating revenue, so any head start AMD can get here could be very beneficial.

To achieve this success, AMD is looking to deliver in three key areas: bang per buck, performance per watt and software. On the first point, AMD wants the RX 480 to reduce the cost of entry to VR by delivering hitherto unseen performance for this price point. On the second point, it's also aiming to enable thing and light gaming notebooks to deliver console-class gaming experiences (remember, the PS4 Neo is widely rumoured to be using a Polaris part). Finally, AMD is trying to leverage its renewed focus on software to continually deliver solid drivers and ever simpler ways for developers to port games from console to PC. To these ends, AMD has produced two new GPUs: Polaris 10, a >5 TFLOPS part, and Polaris 11, a >2 TFLOPS part. These power levels were supposedly specifically chosen to be similar to console parts, but it's desktop graphics cards that we're of course interested in, and there are three in the Polaris lineup that have been officially confirmed thus far. First, of course, is the one launching today, the RX 480, which utilises a fully enabled Polaris 10 GPU and targets beyond HD and VR gaming. The RX 470 uses the same GPU but is culled a little and is touted as the 1080p powerhouse, while the RX 460 moves to the Polaris 11 GPU and is designed for esports titles and built as a quick and easy upgrade for virtually any system – it's a sub-75W part without a supplemental power connector.