AMD RX 480 Offers 80% of GTX 1070 Performance For Half The Price
In the wake of Nvidia’s new Pascal lineup comes the latest and greatest from the red team. At Computex AMD announced the first of it’s cards using their new Polaris architecture. The AMD RX 480 is a VR capable video card – no surprise there. What’s amazing is the price: $199.
With the cheaper of Nvidia’s new cards coming in at $379, that’s a substantial savings that could open up VR to a much wider audience. AMD’s ‘waterdrop’ strategy focuses on offering powerful, efficient, and value conscious products to the maximum possible audience, essentially leaving the ultimate high end to Nvidia. Or does it? One benchmark shown by AMD claimed that a pair of AMD RX 480’s in Crossfire (like SLI) actually outperform the GTX 1080 in Ashes of the Singularity. That benchmark is certainly cherry picked, but is interesting nonetheless as 2 RX 480’s would be cheaper than a single GTX 1080.
So how do all these new cards stack up in terms of raw horsepower? We don’t have independent number for the X 480 yet, so let’s look purely at theoretical compute power.
On paper AMD stands toe to toe with the GTX 1070 certainly, matching up very well in most categories especially given its massive price advantage. For reference, the leaked Playstation Neo specs suggest that the console is targeting ~4 TFLOPS of performance, while Xbox Scorpio is supposedly aiming for 6 TFLOPS.
Of particular note is the number of compute units on this new AMD chip – 36. That’s the number of compute units on the leaked PS Neo specs. Could the Neo be packing a custom version of the RX 480, possibly clocked down to keep heat under control? It’s definitely a possibility, and adds even more fuel to the E3 2016 fire. Stay tuned to COG for the latest – E3 is only a week away, and we’ll be rooting around for the best possible information!