AMD Teases Radeon RX 480: Launching June 29th For $199
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2016 10:00 PM ESTAMD's Full Teaser Text
On June 01, 2016 at 10 a.m. China Standard Time (3 a.m. BST / 4 a.m. CEST) the Radeon Technologies Group will be announcing:
- Radeon™ RX 480 set to drive premium VR experiences into the hands of millions of consumers; priced from just $199
- First Polaris architecture-based graphics processor to deliver VR capability common in $500 GPUs; expected to accelerate the size of the VR-ready install-base and dramatically increase the pace of VR ecosystem growth
- RadeonTM RX 480 specifications including:
| AMD Radeon RX 480 | |
| TFLOPs (FMA) | >5 TFLOPs |
| Compute Units | 36 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 256GB/sec |
| Memory Clock | 8Gbps GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit |
| VRAM | 4GB/8GB |
| Typical Board Power | 150W |
| VR Premium | Yes |
| AMD FreeSync | Yes |
| DisplayPort | 1.3/1.4 HDR |
Set to formally launch on June 29th, the Radeon™ RX 480 will deliver the world’s most affordable solution for premium PC VR experiences, including a model that is both HTC™ Vive Ready and Oculus™ Rift™ certified and delivering VR capability common in $500 GPUs.
In a notable market survey, price was a leading barrier to adoption of VR. The $199 SEP for select Radeon™ RX Series GPUs is an integral part of AMD’s strategy to dramatically accelerate VR adoption and unleash the VR software ecosystem. AMD expects that its aggressive pricing will jumpstart the growth of the addressable market for PC VR and accelerate the rate at which VR headsets drop in price:
- More affordable VR-ready desktops and notebooks: AMD expects that affordable PC VR enabled by Polaris architecture-based graphics cards will drive a wide range of VR-ready desktops and notebooks, providing a catalyst for the expansion of the addressable market to an estimated 100 million consumers over the next 10 years.
- Making VR accessible to consumers in retail: Thus far, retail has not been a viable channel for VR sales as average system costs exceeding $999 have precluded VR-ready PCs from seeing substantial shelf space. The Radeon™ RX Series graphics cards will enable OEMs to build ideally priced VR-ready desktops and notebooks well suited for the retail PC market.
- Unleashing VR developers on a larger audience: Adoption of PC VR technologies by mainstream consumers is expected to spur further developer interest across the ecosystem, unleashing new VR applications in education, entertainment, and productivity as developers seek to capitalize on the growing popularity of the medium.
- Reducing the cost of entry to VR: AMD expects that affordable PC VR enabled by Polaris architecture-based graphics cards will dramatically accelerate the pace of the VR ecosystem, driving greater consumer adoption, further developer interest, and increased production of HMDs, ultimately resulting in a lower cost of entry as prices throughout the VR ecosystem decrease over time.
The Radeon™ RX Series launch represents the first salvo in AMD’s new “Water Drop” strategy aimed at releasing new graphics architectures in high volume segments first to support continued market share growth for Radeon™ GPUs. In May 2016, Mercury Research reported that AMD gained 3.2% market share in discrete GPUs in Q1 2016. The Radeon™ RX Series will address a substantial opportunity in PC gaming: more than 13.8 million PC gamers who spend $100-300 to upgrade their graphics cards, and 84% of competitive and AAA PC gamers. With Polaris architecture-based Radeon™ RX Series graphics cards, AMD intends to redefine the gaming experience in its class, introducing dramatically improved performance and efficiency, support for compelling VR experiences, and incredible features never before possible at these prices.
Supporting Quotes:
“VR is the most eagerly anticipated development in immersive computing ever, and is the realization of AMD’s Cinema 2.0 vision that predicted the convergence of cinematic visuals and interactivity back in 2008,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “As we look to fully connect and immerse humanity through VR, cost remains the daylight between VR being the purview of the wealthy, and universal access for everyone. The Radeon™ RX Series is the disruptive technology that adds rocket fuel to the VR inflection point, turning it into a technology with transformational relevance to consumers.”
“The Radeon™ RX series efficiency is driven by major architectural improvements and the industry’s first 14nm FinFET process technology for discrete GPUs, and could mark an important inflection point in the growth of virtual reality,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “By lowering the cost of ownership and increasing the VR TAM, Radeon RX Series has the potential to propel VR-ready systems into retail in higher volumes, drive new levels of VR content investment, and even drive down the cost of VR headsets.”
“We congratulate AMD for bringing a premium VR ready GPU to market at a $199 price point,” said Dan O’Brien, vice president of virtual reality, HTC. “This shows how partners like AMD survey the entire VR ecosystem to bring an innovative Radeon RX Series product to power high end VR systems like the HTC Vive, to the broadest range of consumers.”
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fingerbob69 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
"Maybe this way we'll get aftermarket cards with an 8 Pin connector and a heap of overclocking headroom"That would be the RX 490 @ $299 ...29th June SURPRISE!
PocketNerd - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Aside from the usual "don't knock it till we see the benchmarks" routine..This thing is $130 cheaper than the 390, and even if the clocks aren't as high the architecture is supposed to be more efficient so I wouldn't count this out just yet. I was already considering getting the GTX 1070 but if this thing is comparable I might just get the 480.
Kutark - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
It won't be comparable to the 1070. I say that not as a fanboi, but the argument of economics. They've announced the price target as being $200, they simply would not sell a card that trades blows with a 1070 for half the cost, that would literally be throwing away free money.Meteor2 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
...or, AMD would get very high sales (as this is much more affordable) while cutting off Nvidia's revenue. Though it would just result in a price war.praxis22 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
I have 15 years of economics under my belt, so I'd say "nonsense" Or if you're a Brit, "Pish and likewise Tosh" :)From what I've read and seen, mostly deeply technical and geeky, not economic. What this is, is a land grab. In 4x terms this is a Rush. At a stroke, AMD will own, the laptop segment, with Polaris 11, the Console segment, since Nvidia wasn't interested. Apple, and the consumer market. They also own the graphic subsystem with Mantle/Vulkan, So they get Android and iOS, etc. Since they have the consoles, and games port to the PC from consoles, it makes more sense to code to Vulkan.
At a stroke AMD now owns PC gaming into the future. MSFT continues to screw up, since Direct X12 doesn't support dual cards, which Vulkan does out of the box. I have Vulkan drivers on windows 7 right now.
I own an R9 390, before that I had a GTX 660. I bought the 660 as it was a 200+ Euro card at the time, the sweet spot of a gaming PC. I bought the R9 390 as the game I play mostly is Skyrim, and there isn't a card available that will excel at fully modded Skyrim, so I went for brute power and lots of VRAM, at the expense of Power consumption, (who cares about Performance per Watt?) It cost me something like 360 Euro, plays everything else at Max. Modded Witcher3, DA:I, that sort of thing. Plays Skyrim OK, Gave me about 50% more fps than the 660 with over 600+ mods Allows me to use 5GB of VRAM even with an ENB, Which takes main memory into VRAM to stop the game crashing. This is on Windows 7, MSFT screwed the pooch for DX9 in Windows 10, limits all card to 4GB, even the GTX 980 Ti. But I digress...
What I really want is Skyrim in VR, for that I need 4k to get stereoscopic 1080p. Given that Occulus is actually running two screens I figure the software must drive this. the problem is that are no 4K screens, So I can probably use two 2k screens with a high PPI, and drive them from separate cards. I say "probably" as until I get my hands on one or two, Or I see indepth reviews, I won't know. However, given that I have two monitors at work as single view pane, (under Linux) I figure it can't be that hard.
What this does is make Dual card setups possible for the mainstream, and AMD are making a push for VR.
tldr; Your economics argument is specious, AMD aren't going for the performance crown, as nobody who bought a 970, will buy AMD anyway. They'll buy the 1070 and lust after a 1080. What AMD are going for is market dominance, and market share, They will sell millions of these, to OEM's looking to build mass consumer products, and the console manufacturers & Apple. They sold it at $200 not to make excessive profit. But to own the market. With Intel retiring to the Perfomance arena too, (with the loss of 12K jobs recently) then AMD may well end up owning the CPU market with Xen too.
This is not about performance, it's about price. This is not winner takes all, this is commodity pricing, you have the wrong economic model. :)
jjj - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Do remember that in high end (1070) the value is lower than in midrange.People got excited about the 1070 value because they are shortsighted, it might be good value for high end but the best value is never there.
AMD here is likely to be offering very solid value and make it hard for Nvidia to beat them by a large margins. If Nvidia decides to beat them they can by a little but they can't make AMD look bad and AMD can slightly adjust prices if needed. Assuming this card is a bit faster than the 390, the pricing is just right.
We'll see what the final power numbers are and the die size and only then we can figure out where AMD really is.
praxis22 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
I think you're missing the point. In economic terms people who buy the high end cards are price-elastic. they don't care how much it cost.Back in the day I bought an ATI 9700Pro, it was, for about 4-6 months, the fastest graphic card in the world. I paid a lot of money for it, I would have paid more, because I wanted the best. I wanted to own the fastest graphic card in the world. It broke my heart when it died, a heat pad shrivelled and detached and the GPU fried itself, even when I installed an aftermarket cooler it stayed dead. :(
Nobody but geeks and gamers actually upgrades a PC, there are far more gamers that play on a console, simply because it's easier and cheaper, than having to maintain a PC. Simply plug and play. This is why they write for the console and back port to the PC these days.
Similarly very few people actually build a PC from scratch, this is why Valve's survey is so useful. this is what the many people who use Steam are gaming on, and hence what developers should aim for to gain the largest audience.
By our very nature, taking about hardware specs on a technology web site, we are not "normal" indeed the Normals are by definition the mainstream, people who buy at best Buy or other big box retail stores.
This is why I say that people who consciously go out and buy a new GPU as an upgrade are the minority, and likely already have a preference/prejudice as to what they will buy, and the new 480 is aimed squarely at the sweet spot, of price & performance for people who are limited on what they can spend (price-inelastic) either with having somebody else tell them about it, or having somebody else build it. This is "normal" for PC hardware these days.
The stuff you'll find in big box retail is always exploitative. They usually give you a good CPU, typically over specified for gaming which is GPU limited, and give you a passable GPU, that will likely need to be replaced within a year. On a recent trawl through a refitted Consumer electronics big box I found that most of the PC's where offering an i7 6700 with a 970 for around a 1000 Euro. That is a serious chunk of change to drop (price elastic) for a PC, when you buy a console for $400 or less.
PC Master Race on Reddit have builds, from $331 to $901 all but one of them socket an AMD GPU because of price. The two cheaper boxes socket AMD Athalon's the two more expensive builds socket an i5.
There is an article on the Verge today all about Intel realising that increasingly they are not going to be 'Inside' on what remains of the new PC market.
So I say again, this is a land grab, colonising the parts of the market that the previous incumbents have left behind, and doing so at a price that appeals directly to the price-inelastic consumer, and OEM's that build for normals.
Whether people here like AMD or not, doesn't matter, this is not aimed at us.
just4U - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
What you seem to forget is the 9700 PRO came out after the Radeon 8000 series.. What happened there precisely? Do you remember? They were offering Geforce 3 performance at close to half the price... The next 2 generations saw cards from both companies coming out at in around that benchmark price (slightly higher.. but not much)They did the same thing with the 3800 series against those magical 8800s..and didn't quit match the performance but came close.. by the time the 4000s came out they'd surpassed NVidia again and kept prices at that sweet spot.
Nvidia started raising prices again in the 500 series..even though Amd had comparable products (although late..) at cheaper prices.. now we see those bumps again just in time for AMD to bring them back down to reasonable levels..
Or so it looks to me.
just4U - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
ofcourse their not doing it for us (forgot to add that lol..) it's to brand recognition, and market share. AMD knows where it plays at and what it can do.. but it's been Nvidia all the way since the Geforce 2 to push the pricing envelope.praxis22 - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
Do I remember? No :) I built my first computer from a kit in 1981, and went through many "home" computers, including a DEC Alpha UDB, (I'm a UNIX admin) before I owned a PC. The first PC I ever owned was powered by a P4 Northwood, and some crappy Nvidia card, a 240 or a 440, something like that. Then I spent more on the 9700 Pro than I had on the computer :)That said after watching some videos last night I came to the conclusion that IMO, while AMD's products are "competitive" I believe that they have chosen not to compete for the performance crown, and are instead playing their own game. Namely occupying the low-middle ground, and selling millions of SKU's to OEM's, the console makers and Apple. We get to see discrete graphics cards, but we're not their audience.