When AMD first unveiled Polaris 11, the company revealed that is featured 1,024 shaders in its full form. In a surprising move at launch, the top end Polaris 11 SKU, the RX 460, only featured 896 shaders. After being out in the market for a while, we are now seeing our first full Polaris 11 Radeon product. Sapphire has released the new Nitro RX 460 OC with all 1,024 shaders available straight from the factory.
With most CPUs and GPUs, there is usually a SKU that uses up the whole die. On the rare occasions that it does not, the usual reasons are the lack of market demand or the yields are not good enough. For Polaris 11, it seems like AMD felt like that there wasn’t a market there that would require the extra 128 shaders. Due to the slightly fewer shaders though, AMD left a larger gap than necessary between the RX 460 and the RX 470.
When Nvidia launched the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, this meant AMD lacked a suitable response. This has not been the first time we’ve had an issue like this before where AMD latter had to plug in the gap. Now that we have full Polaris 11, we won’t have to wait for the refresh anymore. For now, Sapphire is only releasing the card for the Chinese market so it remains to be seen if this SKU will expand to the rest of the world.
