Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the affinity-for-powerful-GPU dept.

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.

2 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How much was this advertisement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    - 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.

    Funny - the cheapest 1070 is $120 more than the AMD card. That's over 50% more cost for a modest (20% ish) performance improvement. Considering that less than 5% (wheee lots of percentages here) of gamers buy a card that costs over 200 bucks (source: steam) I think you are being dishonest. Nvidia is the one that doesn't have a product to compare.

    For someone who isn't a 'video card enthusiast' you sure did regurgitate the entirety of the Nvidia talking points against the competition though!

  2. Hell yeah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These cards seem to work great with open source drivers on Linux. Check out the comparison between open source driver and Pro driver here: http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect/1606281-HA-RX480LINU80/54caad64cb9009a3376fea79c64da84e01d7e108

    And two of these will blow away GTX 1080 at 1/4 of the price! And for 1/2 of the price of 1070!

    On top of that, with the two cards, I can setup KVM with VGA passthrough and play games in KVM without ever rebooting into windows!

    I am sick of having to install the damned proprietary driver and/or wait for the stupid new driver to get released when the kernel driver ABI or Xorg ABI changes.

    I've been buying Nvidia cards for years, and I gotta say that this card is excellent. Anyone that is not a complete idiot will realize this.

    Lets see:
    - Open source drivers which means that I never have to worry about stupid proprietary crap again
    - High performance per dollar
    - You can buy 4 of them for price of 1 GTX 1080
    - You can buy 2 of them for price of 1 GTX 1070
    - With two cards I can setup KVM with VGA passthrough and play games in Linux
    - Finally able to say "fuck nvidia"

    Conclusion: I am buying 2 of these. Fuck Nvidia.