AMD'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.”

AMD Teases Radeon RX 480
Comments Locked

377 Comments

View All Comments

  • Narg - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    G-Sync is a poor reason. Just lock your frame rates. Moving frame rates are just as bad a sync issues. Smooth game play comes from a steady frame rate. And since the human eyes can detect more than 30 FPS, I'm still at odds as to why people bother. More is not always better, or useful at all.
  • blppt - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    Because tearing can still happen at lower than fixed framerates too. If it were as simple as locking my games to 60fps without vsync, I wouldnt even consider buying a gsync/freesync monitor. And tearing bugs the hell out of me---what's the point of getting a card able to play the latest high-end graphics when those wonderful graphics are tearing?
  • HideOut - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    again, why do we have to log in now for every post...

    But human eyes can see 50-60fps if you have normal vision. Some people with extremely sensitive yes can get closer to 70. 30 is laggy as hell in action sequences.
  • Morawka - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    nonsense. human eyes can recognize the fluidity difference all the way up to 175 FPS. Just pull out your iphone and put it in video mode and select 120 or 240 FPS capture and notice how much fluid the movements are.
  • willis936 - Sunday, June 5, 2016 - link

    Well phone displays are only running at 60 fps so I'm not quite sure what looking at it would tell you.
  • bcronce - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link

    Humans don't see in "FPS", but we tend to normalize to FPS which has some issues since we perceive different different aspects of FPS.

    Human vision has a minimum of around 24 FPS to see "motion" before we start to see a slide show of rapidly succeeding images. Humans process images at a rate of about 30 updates per second. It can take up to 100ms to integrate an image into consciousness. While 10ms is considered instant for delay purposes, the brain can detect timing anomalies close to 1ms. We can visually recognize unexpected differences in images as fast as 300fps.

    The best way to describe human vision in a nutshell is we process about 30fps, but we continuously integrate and can detect visual anomalies at a rate of around 300fps.

    I have myself been able to reliably tell the difference between 70fps and 85fps in my hayday of Counter-Strike, and I was able to eventually notice after several seconds if someone was using a 120hz screen because of the higher real FPS. Fast paced motions were noticeably smoother and easier to predict instead of the strobe-effect slide-show of 85hz. In both situations the rendering FPS was about 150-200, but the refresh was either 85hz or 120hz, and it was noticeable.
  • HollyDOL - Monday, June 6, 2016 - link

    I suggest reading some scientific facts about this human eye fps issue. For one I recommend Michael Duggan's "The Official Guide to 3D Game Studio", the most interesting part here: https://books.google.cz/books?id=weMLAAAAQBAJ&...
  • G0053 - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link

    I am by no means a competitive gamer, but I can perceive the drop from 120 to 100 fps on my 144hz monitor in games a simple as Heroes of the Storm. Even my wife notices a reduction in smoothness of game play in Borderlands when dropping from 72 to sub 60fps.
  • scewb - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link

    The human eye can physiologically detect up to 1000 frames per second. 60 is acceptable in slow games but i want 150+ in competitive FPS.
  • vango - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link

    Your stupid.. your eyes can see past 30 frames easy.. I can sure tell by any weak game on a console in comparison .. I also have issues with some games dipping below 60 down to 30 when I play games and noticed the slow down so yeah it is a big deal having plenty of frames when action picks up in a game because they drop.. So you really don't know what your talking about. Your eyes don't work like that MR Doc Narg.. By the way it's clear to see the difference in 4k video but guess what the average is 72 frames during video. Just stick to your console where you belong..

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now