AMD introduces Radeon RX 480 video card with Polaris GPU – update

AMD has introduced its first GPU in the new ‘Polaris’ generation during the Computex fair in Taiwan, which is baked on the 14nm finfet process. According to AMD, the GPU in the RX480 video card is fast enough for running VR games and costs $199.

The GPU of the Radeon RX480 has 36 compute units, which is good for a computing power of more than 5Tflops. That confirms the earlier rumor that the RX480 would have a processing power of up to 5.5Tflops. While Teraflops are not directly related to performance in games, the computing power of the RX480 falls somewhere between that of the Radeon R9 390 and 390X. Given that the 390X is not the fastest video card of the previous generation, it is obvious that AMD will release faster video cards based on the Polaris architecture in the future.

The RX480 is equipped with 4 or 8GB GDDR5 memory, which communicates with the GPU over a 256bit bus and has a bandwidth of 256GB/s. The card gets a TDP of 150 watts, so a six-pin power connector should be enough to power the card.

During the introduction, AMD announced that the RX480 is intended to make VR games possible for more people thanks to the low introductory price of two hundred dollars. AMD showed a benchmark during the presentation in which two RX480 video cards turn out to be faster than a single GeForce GTX1080 in Ashes of the singularity.

From June 29, the RX480 in 4GB version will be on sale for US dollars 199. It is not yet known how many euros that amount translates into. The 8GB variant is probably slightly more expensive, but AMD does not mention a suggested retail price in its press release.

Update 11.43 am: TechPowerUp has published press images of the RX480. The website also shows a photo of a screen that shows that the speed of the gpu is 1266MHz.