After debuting the new RX 480 GPU, AMD also teased 2 other Polaris GPUs as well. Dubbed the RX 470 and RX 460, the two cards are meant to fall beneath the RX 480 and fill the gap between $100 and $200. Today, we’re getting new leaked slides that detail more specifications for the budget GPUs. From the leaked information, AMD has made a number of surprising choices.
First off for the RX 470, AMD has chosen to use Polaris 10 with 32 CUs enabled. This means a total of 2048 stream processors which is only 256 fewer than the RX 480. With the same 4/8GB of GDDR5 over the same 256bit bus, the RX 470 looks like it will be really competitive with the RX 480. Most suggestions pointed to 28 or 30 CUs which would leave a bit more room for the RX 480.
The other big surprise is the RX 460. According to the slides, the card will feature only 14 CUs for 896 stream processors. This means it’s not featuring the full Polaris 11 die which is 16 CUs/1024 stream processors. This means there will be more than a doubling of performance between the RX 460 to the RX 470, making the RX 460 value pretty bad unless it costs about $75 or less.
The final reveal is that Vega is still sticking to its original launch date. Given the vague roadmap, it’s either really late 2016 or early 2017. From this information, it looks like the RX 470 will be the card to get for the best value. Hopefully, the rumours that point to an early August launch hold true.
Maybe Apple has all the 16 CU Polaris 11 chips?
This all looks rather strange. A 32 CU 470 would need to cost close to the 480 or it would not be worth it getting a 480. The 460 looks underpowered. It looks to be in line with the R9 260, but that’s strange considering the performance of the 480 and 470. Unless it has a very high clock. 2GB of RAM is also behind the times.