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AMD Extends Polaris GPU Line-up With Mainstream Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 (hothardware.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the affinity-for-power-GPUs dept.

Some more graphics cards news via our long time reader MojoKid: AMD is officially announcing its newest mainstream members of the Polaris graphics family today, known as the Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460. AMD is touting the RX 470 as a perfect companion for 1080p resolution gaming, offering 60+ FPS performance (with anti-aliasing enabled) in popular game titles. The RX 460, on the other hand, is based on Polaris 11 architecture, which has a more budget-minded performance profile. If all you're looking for is an efficient, yet capable eSports gaming card, then AMD claims the RX 460 still has you covered. Peak compute performance for the RX 470 drops in at 4.9 TFLOPs (compared to 5.8 TFLOPs for the Radeon RX 480). The RX 460 has less than half the stream processors and less than half the compute units of the RX 470 and as a result, the peak compute performance stands at 2.2 TFLOPs. Pricing for the Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 is set at $149 and $99 MSRP, respectively.

42 comments

  1. The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    If they can get that kinda performance with good stability. I haven't tried AMD since the 43xx era because the 4350 I used to replace an aging 1650x could never stay stable in the game I was playing at the time Psychnauts) and my friends with AMD either had tons of stability issue or only ever play big titles like Call of Duty and Dots ( which run fine)

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    1. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Informative

      The stability issues have been fixed at AMD for years, once the AMD team took over from ATI who were always hit and miss when it came to driver releases. I've been using AMD exclusively since the HD 4850 (currently on the R9 280) and I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a graphics driver issue, now you are more likely to get a bad Windows patch than a bad GPU driver.

      One thing I have to give them credit for is when they EOLed their ancient VLIW card line they made one last driver so that if you wanted to run newer versions of Windows, even Windows 10, then you can. I just wish Nvidia would have done the same as I have a ton of hardware at the shop that I couldn't lock in the Win 10 free upgrade for (just in case the customer might want Win 10 later) because there simply wasn't an nvidia driver that would function. But just to see if it worked I decided to lock in the upgrade with my netbook which has the AMD E-350 chip which has the very first gen APU the HD 6310, a really old chip, and....it worked perfectly fine.

      So if you want a good GPU at a cheap price I'd say go for it. I'd get one myself but my R9 280 runs all the games I play at 60 FPS+ with all the bling cranked so I don't see a point ATM in upgrading but when it gets to the point that isn't the case? I'll get another AMD GPU.

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    2. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The GTX 1060 is probably a better buy though...

    3. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Narishma · · Score: 1

      How so? That card is more expensive than the RX480.

      --
      Mada mada dane.
    4. Re: The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

      That was kinda my thought. I can't see comparing the two when there's an $80 price difference on a $200 card. But $200 is my price ceiling for graphics so take that with a grain of salt.

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    5. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've been using ATI/AMD cards primarily since the Rage II days or so. I've been mostly happy with the driver quality overall but it's gotten so buggy lately (mainly CAD programs and boring 2D stuff really) that I'm buying a nvidia card next time.

    6. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm still not convinced.

      The Nvidia GPUs are clearly leaps ahead in terms of computational-power-per-watt. - This metric cannot be understated. It's pretty much the new Moore's law. It's the biggest and most important measure of a chip or system and the biggest sign of a more advanced design.

      On top of that Nvidia's software suite (Drivers, management utilities, video capture, overlay, etc) is much better than AMDs. It's more stable, has better features, is less annoying, and just works better in general. You just have a better quality of life experience with your Nvidia product.

    7. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The stability issues have been fixed at AMD for years, once the AMD team took over from ATI...

      Why do you think any staffing changes happened in october of 2006, when AMD bought ATI. Aside from normal personnel changes (people come, people go), it's the same GFX driver "team" it's always been.

    8. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "I haven't tried AMD since the 43xx era because the 4350 I used to replace an aging 1650x could never stay stable in the game I was playing at the time"

      That was ENTIRELY your fault. The 4350 is a mobile GPU while the X1650 was a desktop-class GPU of which the GT and XT versions handily STOMPED the HD4350.

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      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    9. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Khyber · · Score: 1

      Laptopvideo2go should be able to show you how to modify the .ini driver file (or might even have one pre-made) so that the newer driver sets will recognize the older hardware. Do the upgrade and then install the GPU afterwards.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    10. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      The GTX 1060 is in no mans land, no SLI, more expensive than the RX 480 with similar performance. It only has a single defining benefit and that is it is slightly less power hungry than the RX 480, I don't know what the fuck Nvidia were thinking with the pricing when they released it.

    11. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by Kartu · · Score: 1

      Those are just buzzwords, part of the known FUD campaign, not facts.
      AMD drivers were better than nVidia's for the last 2 years or so at the very least.
      AMD's GPUs took over much more expensive competitors from the past (290x vs 780Ti) in most titles, nVidia's simply age terribly.

      nVidia does hold the upper hand as far as perf/watt goes, that's true, but it doesn't change anything in 480/470/460 tier (and 470/460 will likely have better perf/w than 480) as difference is pretty negigable, about 40 watts or below.

      We'll see how it goes on higher tiers, once Vega chips arrive.

    12. Re:The RX470 makes me want to try AMD again by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      The problem was their damned Nforce boards, a ton of really nice C2Qs and Phenom I quads came with Nforce and it will NEVER EVER WORK with anything newer than Windows 7. Sure you can tweak the .ini to get the GPU to work....WTF good is that gonna do when you have no networking and no sound?

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  2. What's with all the cheap video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Seriously, this is a nerd site, and nerds care about performance. Pony up for a real video card and get real performance instead of second rate budget stuff. Nvidia cards also work better on Linux, instead of this cheap AMD stuff. Maybe some of you want to spend your days looking through open source video driver code, but real nerds want to actually do stuff and get good video performance. This isn't it, sorry.

    1. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by by+(1706743) · · Score: 1

      Sure, but if you're trying to do, say, some GPU computing with a limited budget, it might (?) be wise to shop around and perhaps settle for multiple budget cards as opposed to one mid/high-end card. Taking the numbers at face value, the RX470 claims to offer 4.9 TFLOPs for $150, whereas the GTX1080 is something like 9 TFLOPS for ~$600 (I'm assuming these are comparable floating point tests, but perhaps they're not...).

      Yes, I'd rather an Nvidia card that offers good performance and "just works" under Linux -- but everyone has their own requirements.

    2. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by blackomegax · · Score: 2

      cool troll bro. AMD works flawlessly on linux with FLOSS drivers, and you don't even have to poke the code (in fact, it's in most distro's as binaries! that work! shocking!) You DO lose some performance, but AMDGPU drivers are still a heavy WIP that AMD and community are rapidly improving. But you keep trollin'.

    3. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Dogtanian · · Score: 2

      Seriously, this is a nerd site, and nerds care about performance.

      Some do, some don't.

      Maybe some of you want to spend your days looking through open source video driver code, but real nerds want to actually do stuff and get good video performance.

      So, someone's not a "real nerd" if they want to spend "days looking through open source video driver code" (sounds pretty stereotypically nerdish to me) rather than just getting stuff done (which was traditionally associated with ordinary, non-nerdish users who saw the technology as just a means to an end)?

      Let's face it; you're trying to force a definition of "nerd" that supports your own point of view, a la "No true Scotsman".

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    4. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The problem with a lot of the budget cards this go round seems to be things other than computational restrictions; things like memory throughput and limited compute units are what will hold these back.

      I'm a bit disappointed with these latest offerings as I currently have a old 280X that is almost comparable to the RX480 and probably still better all-around than the RX470; Having to go to the top tier just to have a reasonable upgrade from a card that's 3 years old feels wrong. I shouldn't complain though, the value over time for my existing card has been great.

    5. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes this is a nerd site, we like to know what our options are.
      What you think we are is some kind of performance masturbators, they have other sites to look at.

    6. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is that some /g/ copypasta?

    7. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Seriously, this is a nerd site, and nerds care about performance.

      True nerds don't care about graphics performance, they only care how fast their GPU can do matrix multiplications in OpenCL/CUDA for their neural network training cycles.

      Has anyone benchmarked these cards for, say, a three layer denoising autoencoder ANN on MNIST digit recognition?

    8. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Right, but even then, I don't care how fast my GPU can do anything. What I do care about is that the code I write is efficient enough that there won't be bottlenecks on my workstation. I mean, it has to scale too, right? And when I need to use an API, it should work on my workstation. That includes 3D stuff, whether I'm doing graphics or statistics. That's why I love my AMD A-series! It isn't the fastest at anything, and it isn't the most efficient on the market, but it is the most efficient that can "do everything" without needing a discrete card. If I had a more powerful system, the fans would all have to run faster, and it would be noisy and obnoxious. I could build a box around it, but then it would build up heat and reduce the life of the components.

      The idea that a modern linux user has to futz with things is kinda funny. Linux is a great choice because it lets you futz, but no, that hasn't been required for a... long long time. If he doesn't want to futz, he shouldn't futz. But why does he think nerds are against doing it? What if I miss calculating modelines?

    9. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Car analogy time:
      Someone who only cares about performance? We call those race drivers. Someone who only wants a solid car to drive often? Taxi driver. Car enthusiasts/nerds will probably have some oddball car polished and styled in top condition and spend an inordinate amount of time keeping it that way. That said, most of them don't want a broken transmission. It's not the sort of thing you casually tinker with, it's very basic functionality that has to work. Fixing it yourself would be very nerdy but it's for a special few. I have the feeling OS/driver issues are the same for computer nerds, most want that part to work so they can be nerds on a different level. It's not exactly like a kernel panic makes me want to be a kernel developer...

      --
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    10. Re:What's with all the cheap video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's the worst car analogy ever, sort of like a Yugo.

  3. I'm going to throw up. by Type44Q · · Score: 0

    If all you're looking for is an efficient, yet capable eSports gaming card

    eSPorts gaming card?? The inane desperation is strong in this one...

    1. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Unlike you, some people actually like sports and getting up and doing stuff rather than sitting around all day eating Cheetos and getting even fatter. Maybe you don't care about sports but don't ridicule those of us who do.

    2. Re:I'm going to throw up. by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      NO its not. 'eSports capable' is a distinct level of hardware power that is well understood. I really dont like the term eSports, but this usage is legit.

      --
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    3. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      E sports, you fucking dork.

    4. Re:I'm going to throw up. by blackomegax · · Score: 1

      Translation: games that were designed for lowest common denominator hardware (Intel GPU) will run super well with settings jacked far up on this.

    5. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think the shot was at "e"Sports, not real sports. I can't think of any real sports that allow you to sit on your ass and eat Cheetos while playing. Hell, maybe we can make that part of the definition of a "sport".

    6. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      One of the traditional differentiating factors between "sport" and "game" was the risk of injury. As such, car racing was a sport, and chess was a game.

      Using that same standard, eSports simply need controllers with a strong enough force-feedback system to break smaller bones and/or cause second degree burns.

    7. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You might be on to something. Sort of like that global conquest video game scene in the Bond movie Never Say Never Again.

    8. Re: I'm going to throw up. by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      One of the traditional differentiating factors between "sport" and "game" was the risk of injury. As such, car racing was a sport, and chess was a game.

      It's all fun and games until you find a bishop in your eye socket.

      --
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    9. Re:I'm going to throw up. by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      If all you're looking for is an efficient, yet capable eSports gaming card

      eSPorts gaming card?? The inane desperation is strong in this one...

      Whoops, you're sounding a bit out of touch there. Dota 2 International 6 prize pool now about to pass $19 million. More than 1 million online and playing right now.

      --
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    10. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      One of the traditional differentiating factors between "sport" and "game" was the risk of injury.

      Never heard of carpal tunnel syndrome? I recently saw a top Dota 2 professional put on a full arm carpal tunnel brace to play.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    11. Re:I'm going to throw up. by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Translation: games that were designed for lowest common denominator hardware (Intel GPU) will run super well with settings jacked far up on this.

      You haven't run Dota 2 recently. A low end card gets you a retro experience.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    12. Re: I'm going to throw up. by Khyber · · Score: 1

      Nah, they'll get CTS from those newer shitty mechanical keyboards out.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  4. Mining by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But how are they at ETH mining?

  5. But these can't possibly beat NVIDIA's Titan XYZ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How can AMD expect to compete with these puny chips?

  6. Passive cooling by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    The RX250 sounds like a candidate for passive cooling. As soon as I see one of those I will grab it, silence is a big deal, and 2.2 tflops is still a lot for my needs.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    1. Re:Passive cooling by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Ah, bleah, RX 450...

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  7. Isn't it amazing how far we have come? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just had a look at when the first supercomputer broke the TFLOP mark and it was only 20 years ago, and now we can get 5 TFLOPs for under $200. Magic.