AMD Demos Polaris 10 – Capsaicin

Right before the Capsaicin event at GDC was about to begin, AMD teased everyone that they will reveal Polaris 10 running a demo for the Valve SteamVR benchmark. Unfortunately, that did not come to pass on the live stream, those of us at home still got a demo of Polaris 10 gameplay in the end.

“Showcasing next-generation VR-optimized GPU hardware – AMD today demonstrated for the first time ever the company’s forthcoming Polaris 10 GPU running Valve’s Aperture Science Robot Repair demo powered by the HTC Vive Pre. The sample GPU features the recently announced Polaris GPU architecture designed for 14nm FinFET, optimized for DirectX® 12 and VR, and boasts significant architectural improvements over previous AMD architectures including HDR monitor support, industry-leading performance-per-watt2, and AMD’s 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.”

Running the latest Hitman title, Polaris 10 seemed to handle itself well enough. Performance, however, is hard to ascertain given the poor quality of the stream, unknown FPS count and unknown settings. For now, we can only speculate whether or not Polaris 10 is big Polaris or not and how it will perform in the end. Luckily, we only have to wait till June before the first Polaris chips arrive in our waiting hands.