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
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  • piiman - Saturday, June 4, 2016 - link

    And yet you have been reading their site for all that time? If they suck why? WHY WHY WHY?
  • tygrus - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    Should have been called the "RX 460" and then leave room for faster products. a 460 is a bigger number than 380 anyway. AMD with 14nm up against Nvidia's 16nm should have given AMD an advantage. The 14nm process being used is obviously not fully optimised and not as mature at the 16nm used elsewhere. AMD need to increase the clocks by 30% to 60% and release the enthusist model with atleast 80% more GPU resources (re. geometry, texture, shader, ROP, MEM) and 30% higher clock rate. More than double the previous performance in the same form factor. The old pattern of improvement applied to the 28nm to 14nm shift would give an ideal of 4x improvement (wishful thinking of the good old days).
  • tygrus - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    I know they have more to come and this isn't the fastest model they will release in the family. Whatever they are planning for in the next 6 to 12months need to be brought forward as quick as possible. Having a better lead could be worth an extra $200M revenue a quarter (and 40% of that as profit). If you think leading the market costs a lot, being the follower (delaying and limiting R&D) leads to less revenue and considerably more losses.
  • slickr - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link

    What are you talking about? This just from the raw numbers seems like its at least 40% faster than the R9380 and both cost $200. If architecture improvements are even semi decent we could be seeing close to 50% faster speeds than the r9 380 at lower wattage and the same price point.

    Considering Nvidia only has the 1070 which goes for at least $400, while the RX 480 would come close to the r9 390x performance, for half the price that is very good.

    I mean lets take Far Cry Primal a new game that is running on an engine equally optimized for both Nvidia and AMD, historically very consistent results for both companies, the 390x comes in at about 50fps at 1440p, the 1070 comes in at about 65fps.

    So basically for HALF the price of the 1070 you are getting 85% of the performance of the 1070.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    "(A Positive Integer)"

    I would hope! Hah
  • CaedenV - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    I laughed so hard when I saw that!
  • Demiurge - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    Seconding the laugh on that one, and adding a laugh for the "(Many)" as well!
  • mr_tawan - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    Hopefully it's not overflowed!
  • edzieba - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    "We have advanced our binning ability to selectively disable HALF a ROP. Suck it, Anandtech!"
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link

    Haha. If they could actually do that, I'd probably publish that letter too...

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