Over the years, PC gamers have experienced a multitude of terrible ports which run poorly even on high-end graphics hardware. This is a major annoyance and unfair when you consider the investment many PC players make compared to their console counterparts. There’s never any justifiable excuse for poor scaling and it’s important for hardware vendors to communicate with developments to create the most seamless user-experience possible. This notion has been considered by AMD and they’re taking important steps to ensure console ports have impressive optimisation across the company’s graphics card range. For example, AMD carefully selected two chips which reflect mainstream customers and enthusiasts requiring additional power. In tandem with their GPUOpen initiative, this allows developers to optimise games for commonly used configurations.
This direct relationship means developers have easy hardware access and encourages more affordable content development.
More specifically, Polaris 10’s 36 compute units, around 5 TFLOPS of power, 256-bit memory bus and 1.4 HDR support brings superb performance at a price most people can afford. On another note, Polaris 11 caters to those with tight budgets and opts for 16 CUs, around 2 TFLOPS of graphics power and offers up to 2.8x performance per watt compared to the previous generation.
According to AMD, the Radeon RX series delivers high-quality VR gaming to all users and can produce a stunning experience which is significantly cheaper than the competition.
The $199 RX 480 is capable of upholding a premium VR experience and could easily attract new gamers to the PC platform.
Judging by Steam VR’s performance test, the RX 480 8GB scores very highly and surpasses the company’s own R9 380 by a noticeable margin.
Polaris isn’t restricted either and supports 1.4 HDR, HDNI 2.0b and FreeSync technology to maintain a smooth experience.
The RX 480 is the flagship in AMD’s affordable Polaris range, and the RX 470 and RX 460 will launch relatively soon. Not so long ago, Lisa Su displayed both of these cards during E3’s PC Gaming Show and I cannot wait to see how they perform.
