AMD must have had a hell of a time for the past few weeks as everyone was raving about Nvidia’s GTX 1070s and 1080s. Today at COMPUTEX, AMD is fighting back, and they’re offering a decently powerful graphics card with a boatload of value. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the RX 480.
Based on the Polaris-10, the RX 480 will come with 36 Compute Units, more that 5 teraflops of computiing power and a memory size of either 4GB of GDDR5 or 8GB of GDDR5. However, the dealmaker has to be its pricing. AMD has announced that the RX 480 will retail for just USD 199 (RM 820), which is a significant price difference when you compare it to the GTX 1070 that retails for USD 380 (RM 1,568). One thing to note though is that the RX 480 might be split into two versions: the 4GB variant, and the 8GB variant. While the 4GB variant will indeed retail for USD 199, rumours are going around that the 8GB variant will have an estimated retail price of USD 250 (RM 1,032).
In terms of raw horsepower, the RX 480 loses out to both the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. However, considering the price difference between both cards, it’s probably expected. On stage, AMD did demonstrate that two RX 480 units in Crossfire setup is able to beat the GTX 1080 when running Ashes of Singularity. The RX 480s managed to run the game at 62.5 FPS while running at 50% computing capacity while the GTX 1080 runs the game at 58.7 FPS at near maximum computing capacity. While the live demo on stage is promising, it’s probably best to wait for third-party benchmarks before we jump on the RX 480 bandwagon.
One of the reasons that AMD will be selling the RX 480 at a low price point is that the company hopes that it would lower the barrier of entry for VR gaming. AMD has proudly boasted that this card is the first graphics card under USD 500 that is able to be deemed VR-ready.
As for the availability of the card, the RX 480 is expected to be available on the 29th of June.