CES 2016: AMD’s upcoming GPU range, codenamed Polaris, is built on a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process and reports massive improvements in performance per watt compared to the competition. To demonstrate this, AMD compared two runs of Star Wars Battlefront; one with an NVIDIA GTX 950 and another using an unannounced Polaris chip. As you can see, Polaris delivers twice the performance per watt and maintained a solid 60 frames-per-second at medium details on a 1920×1080 display.
It’s impressive to see an actual chip from AMD being demoed before its release and to showcase the benefits of a refined manufacturing process. In contrast to this, details about Pascal’s performance, features and architecture is still fairly unknown. You have to commend AMD for adopting such an open approach and the graphics market really needs some competition to rebalance the overall market share percentage. So far, Polaris looks really promising, it’s working, and performing superbly when you take into account, the low-wattage under load. Theoretically, this means core temperatures should be moderate and have enough overclocking headroom providing the cards are not voltage locked.
