With only a month to go till Computex, things are heating up in the rumour wars between AMD and Nvidia. Suitability held in Taiwan, AMD has reportedly shown off the true power of Polaris 10 to a select few ahead of the planned May launch. While we have all seen the Hitman demo at Capsaicin suggest GTX 980Ti levels of performance, the latest event pretty much confirms our thoughts.
As expected, Polaris 10 will feature 2,560 GCN 4.0 shaders with at least 2,304 enabled, all supplied by a 256bit bus featuring GDDR5(X). Given that the GTX 1080 uses GDDR5X, we may see the same with AMD. Due to the process shrink and the many improvements AMD has done to Polaris, its no surprise to see AMD trump Maxwell and catch up to Pascal (which is really Maxwell+compute).
Right now, it is suggested the GTX 1080 will surpass the GTX 980Ti by a bit. This means the Radeon R9 490X with Polaris 10 will either come in at the same level or just under, with the R9 490 doing battle with the GTX 1070 and 1060Ti. Even better though, the R9 490X will reportedly retail for $300-$400, so AMD has a good chance to undercut Nvidia and seize back much-needed marketshare. Hopefully, AMD will one-up Nvidia and bring themselves back into the black.
