AMD RX 480 Offers Best-in-Class Performance For $199/$239

Reader Vigile writes: It's been a terribly long news cycle, but today is finally the day reviews and sales start of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card based on the company's latest Polaris architecture and built on 14nm FinFET process technology. With a starting price tag of $199 for the 4GB model and $239 for the 8GB, the RX 480 has some interesting performance characteristics. Compared to the GeForce GTX 970, currently selling for around $280, the RX 480 performs +/- 5-10% in DX11 games but PC Perspective found that the RX 480 was as much as 40% faster in DX12 titles like Gears of War, Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Compared to previous AMD products, the RX 480 is as fast as a Radeon R9 390 but uses just 150 watts compared to 275 watts for the previous generation. Chances are that NVIDIA will have a competing product based on Pascal available sometime in July, so AMD's advantage may be short-lived; but in the meantime, the Radeon RX 480 is clearly the best GPU for $200.AnandTech has more details.

Comments

Vigile Clearly Works for pcper.com

[SlashdotOgre]

A quick glance at the Vigile's submission history shows that every one of his or her post links to pcper.com. Never heard of the site, and definitely not going to check them out now. If you're going to submit posts like this, at least making your conflict of interest be clear.

Re:Vigile Clearly Works for pcper.com

[thegarbz]

So?

It's just another hardware review site and it wrote about a topic of interest to the /. crowd.

I'd like to remind you that /. is a news aggregator. That means someone submits stories. Whether we accept them is ultimately up to the firehose and the people here.

Re:How much was this advertisement?

[Anubis IV]

So a tech site posts an article with a review about a new piece of tech and it's an ad?

No, but when they're obviously cherry picking facts to suit a pro-AMD narrative, people are justified in calling it an ad. I'm not even a video card enthusiast (I'm rockin' a Mac mini as my primary machine, so I have no horse in this race), but these immediately stood out as red flags to me:
- Boasting about just-launched products beating a two year-old products (GTX 970 was launched in September 2014) without making it clear that that's what the comparison was.

- Conveniently forgetting to mention that the competing product is already obsolete (the GTX 1070 launched three weeks ago).

- Trying to leave the impression that NVIDIA doesn't have a Pascal-based product on the market, even though they've had them out for almost two months now.

- Phrases like "as much as X% faster" when talking about performance.

- Switching the comparison to using previous-gen AMD cards (i.e. major energy hogs) rather than the competition when bragging about energy efficiency gains.

- Carefully selecting price points that let them pretend there's no elephant in the room: that AMD lacks a proper response to the 1070 and 1080.

I genuinely want AMD to do well, since I want a competitive ecosystem where they're all being pushed to do better, but this whole summary is so clearly one-sided that it's no surprise people view it as an ad.

Re:How much was this advertisement?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, where you can find a 1070 for $300? The cheapest one in Newegg is $450, or 2 times the MSRP of the RX480... and thats almost one month after launch.

Not to mention that the 480 is NOT in the same price class as the 970, as the name implies, is the successor of the 380/380X and goes directly against the 960 and 1060. The fact that performance-wise is between the 970 and 980 (or 390/390X) at the same MRSP as the 380 is great news for everyone, specially for NVidia users that right now are being gouged left and right with those overinflated prices and the FE scam.

Re:Raw power was never the issue

[Tough Love]

As long as ATI drivers continue to be sketchy, my first choice will be Nvidia.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? ...

I don't see reviewers complaining about driver issues or rendering artifacts, I do see them commenting on the high performance for low price.

RX 480 draws more power than PCIe spec

[Misagon]

Tom's Hardware tested the power consumption of AMD's reference card and saw that could draw more power from both the motherboard and the 6-pin power connector than the PCI Express specification allows for either of them.

I would wait a while before this issue is resolved. Maybe the issue could be fixed with a driver update, in which case only benchmarks done after the driver update would matter.
Maybe a non-reference card will be released with an 8-pin power connector and better power distribution.