$199 AMD Radeon RX480 Announced!

Release date of 6/29/16. Can't wait to see how this new Polaris based card compares to the GTX 1070 at nearly half the price. Are you guys interested? I know I am.

Anandtech Article: AMD Radeon RX480 $199

Yup - should be somewhere along the lines of an R9 390-390X in terms of performance. It's a no-brainer purchase vs anything slower than a 980ti/1070/1080.

Really aggressive move by AMD and great to see. I hope they reveal their $300 card they hinted at (RX 480X?) in the coming weeks.

If not, I'll be picking one of these up as a stopgap while I wait for Vega.

I was flipping through that video and they showed Doom playing pre-recorded footage at between 60 and 80 FPS, something my 970 does with ease. That might not have been the best thing to show when compared to Nvidia having a guy on stage playing it at between 150 and 200FPS.

Definitely still interested to see benchmarks and comparisons, though.

This is not the card meant to compete with the 1080. A 970 still costs around $300 and that extra $100 is a game changer for some people building a mid range PC. It's interesting to see if they pull this off for sure.

Sounds like an awesome mid-range/budget-ish card but looking at my r9 290 i really want a upgrade from it. Maybe a potential higher-end card from them would fit that bill.

I'm getting so confused by GPU hardware right now having not followed it for a good while. What is this card going to be competing against? I'm running a lowly HD7970 Matrix Platinum which as served me well for a while now but have been thinking of upgrading at some point, I had considered jumping back to Nvidia but that's a tempting price point if it remains as well priced in the United Kingdom.

Plus it's sub-135 watt TDP which allows a lot power supply flexibility. Neat mid-range card, it'll be interesting to see what Nvidia's 1060 or 1050 or whatever it's going to be looks like.

@machofantastico: I believe the 480 will be 160 pounds in the UK (a couple of sites are reporting that, eg. ars technica)

At the moment this has no competition until the GTX 1060 comes out. It's in line to stomp all over everything out there atm except for the top end offerings (fury, fury x, 980ti, Titan, 1070, 1080).

Edit: After making that list of cards which are likely to be the only things faster than this (assuming their claims about perf/watt gains pan out in the reviews), I only now realise how insane this thing is for $199usd...

Their saying VR ready will see what that actually means

Sure. I'll get that if Nvidia doesn't come up with an 1060 (which they won't for a while).

Also, I hope this will be another HD2900 (R9 290X) -> HD3870 (RX480) -> HD4870 (RXwhatever) cycle for AMD. Competition is good for y'all.

Update to my last:

A week or so ago, videocardz.com caught some 3dmark benchmarks which were supposedly the 480 and 480X. The info was sketchy at the time and most disregarded them as probably fake. Well, turns out those were probably on point, AND what people thought was the 480X is actually the plain old 480.

What does this mean? Look at Polaris 67DF:C7. Yup. Looks like this little $199USD card may outbench a GTX980 and hangs up there with the R9 Fury.

EDIT: Note, though looking more and more likely to be true (especially considering how accurate everything else caught by videocardz.com recently has been), peeps should still wait for reviews.

As someone who splurged £600 less than a year ago on a 980ti, you'd think I'd be slightly bitter but I think this is fantastic news. Graphics card warz only benefit the consumer.

Impressive synthetic benchmarks---I'll wait for actual benchmarks before I do anything rash. Has AMD gotten better over the years? I had a 6970 and didn't dig it---tons of developers were crafting games for NVIDIA and I started to encounter FPS issues less than a year after release with FC3. Drivers seemed hit or miss.

On paper it is not as impressive as I was expecting. It has less shaders and memory bandwidth than a 390. But it should be more optimized and be faster in real life than the specs show.

Even if it is just 390 level of performance it has a good price but I don't think it is enough of a boost for me to upgrade my 280X. I only tend to upgrade when I can get double the performance for a reasonable price. I bought my 280X used for 1000SEK about 100 Euro when my friend upgraded to a 970.

I am more interested in RX 490X as i am sure that it will be the middle point between GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

Seems too little too late at this point, if you have a 970 there is no reason to switch and if you have a 390 or over you're probably just pissed. So your market is basically mid range amd users which it would be anyway. If its only as powefull as a 970 then even if its the best price per performance the performance is last gen. Hopefully it is enough to keep the market competitive but seems like amd is falling behind again. They have a chance to undercut 1080/1070 range cards right now but i guess the tech isn't there yet. They may jump ahead of the 1050 and 1060 but who knows how powerful those will be at their price range.

@oursin_360: This card isn't aimed at people who already have 970s, of course they have little reason to switch. It's $200 and these benchmarks show it to be on par with a GTX 980, that is a pretty big deal for people who are still on GPUs like the 750ti, 760, and all those people still on 670s and 680s and equivalent AMD cards.

Right now Nvidia doesn't have a mid-range card that can compete with this. Not everyone has a 900-series card or equivalent right now, and there are people building new PCs all the time. There is plenty of room for a card with this level of performance in the $200 price range, just look at how popular the 750ti was. It's going to be a massive and economical upgrade or a good starting point for a budget PC for a ton of people.

As someone who's still rocking a 660ti. I'm happy about this. That's one hell of an undercut from the norm.

That is sweet deal and could help VR - adaption rates. Definitely thinking this to be an option when upgrading soon.

@mike: I guess your right, that was just my knee jerk reaction and i wasn't thinking about the 600 and 700 series owners(i'm new to nvidia and started at 900 besides my old geforce card). The power consumption seems pretty good as well, and if its' closer to a 980 than a 970 that's real huge i wish this came out last year when i bought my 980 lol.

@oursin_360: I just want to quickly point out that only 5% of steam users have a 970 and 1-2% have better (it's annoying to add up the steam survey table).

So yeah, for like 94% of registered systems this thing will be a major upgrade. Say, conservatively, that only 30% total are people's "main" PCs (so people have steam installed on like their old machines and laptops etc - let's say that's skewing 70% of the steam database). Even then, 80% of users would find this a substantial upgrade.

This is a big power play by AMD - time will tell if it pans out. Personally, I hope it does so Nvidia isn't given a free ticket to run rough shod over gpu pricing forever.

Edit: Sorry to pile on there. You realised your oversight prior to my finishing this post.

As someone with a 760GTX who's been having to make some real compromises with the settings for recently released games, this thing sounds amazing. I was going to wait and see what the 1060GTX came out like price/performance wise but this low price really makes it attractive for me. I'll wait and see what the reviews are like but chances are this is going to be my next card.

Don't forget about all the laptops, Macs, AMD cards, and Titans out there (Titans are not shown on the HW survey) which skew those numbers heavily. 5% is a lot if you look at the big picture. Not to mention that the HW survey is random and people don't always take it on their gaming PC - for instance, the only time I have ever been selected for it was when I was on my Macbook.

@mike: Yup - 5% is huge. I try to account for that in my 2nd para.

5% is big enough that like 40% of people I know who game on their pcs have a 970...

But yeah, for everyone else, this thing is awesome.

...but i just bought my 390 a few months ago. :(

My 980 staring back at me looking less and less appealing.

I want to be excited, but I've had so many bad experiences with AMD videocards in the past couple of years.

VR ready and under 150W means that it can be a good candidate in prebuilt PCs. Therefore, big potential for it to sell lots.

@mcfart: That seems to be AMD's gameplan, small formfactor and low powerconsumption should be very good for pre-built PCs and average user.

As someone looking to upgrade from my 7950, this is very tempting. Still may be worth it to buy a better one and get a longer run out of it.

This card definitely serves a different segment of the market than the 1070. You can tell by pricing alone, so any performance comparison is unfair. While "VR FOR $200" is certainly headline worthy, if you're itching to buy something new I'd wait to see what Nvidia does for a 1060/1050. From what I understand, AMD's Polaris is VERY power inefficient. So when Nvidia announces their mid-range stuff, if it's about the same in terms of performance and price (my guess is 980 performance for $250), but is more energy efficient (which probably means better thermals too) then the choice is clear for those who care to do research before they buy.

This card is a godsend for a person like me. I haven't upgraded my PC in forever in terms of PC upgrading. I've had a 5770 for 6 years. I haven't had the time to upgrade and I've been lucky to run certain recent games (MGSV on medium-ish settings) decently on my computer. You're right on the money, they aimed for people like me.

For the better part of this year I've been looking to just build a new computer and while the 1070 sounds incredible, at basically half the price and with still pretty good performance I'm leaning heavily towards this AMD card. I was looking at buying the 970, but with what I budgeted it was either sacrifice the performance of the cpu for the better gpu at $150 more or settle for a 960 and everything else being better. With the 480 announcement, I'm so happy right now. I'll probably have to wait for what Nvidia comes out to say about the 1060 and stuff, but 480 is just perfect for me.

I'm definitely surprised at how this turned out. Glad to see AMD go all out on the midrange front. Looks like they're willing to give up the high end race with Nvidia and focus on the larger market for midrange

Awesome reveal. So much performance per buck.

Would this force the 970 price point down? And if so, would it even be worth buying an additional card to run 970s in SLI?

hunh neat. Think I'm still going to sit on my hands for a 1070/1080 though

RX 480 comes with a single 6-pin connector (150W), that indicates a very high efficiency because the R9 390 cards that it replaces require 8pin+6pin.

Oh good 480's are back? Those were the monsters back when I built my 2010 computer with dual 4870's!

GPU naming is so terrible.

As someone who is slowly buying parts to build their first gaming pc, I could not be happier! But, I'm not really sure what kind of gpu, motherboard or power supply to get with this new card O.o does anyone know what parts would be recommended for this?

(I already have a gigabyte H11DM-A LGA 151 DDR4 motherboard and a 600 W supply)

@crommi: Well of course the new card is more efficient than the previous card after a double die shrink. But compared to the 1070, which also has a TDP of 150W but also has a slightly larger fab size, it's kinda head scratching why this card is so poor in comparison. I've also read that AMD cards aren't as power efficient as Nvidia cards when idle.

I'm no expert, so someone feel free to correct me. But in thermodynamics thermal efficiency is a relationship between input energy, output energy, and energy lost in the form of heat. At least for a mechanical system anyway. If you were to tell me that I have two independent systems, A and B. Both systems lose the same amount of heat, but system B's output is only 70% of A, I'm gonna be like, well shit, why the hell am I losing so much energy? Oh, because system B is inefficient.

@falconer: We only know the rough ballpark for both cards, but not the actual power consumption. In same vein, I can't really comment on whether 1070 uses less power on idle than RX 480 because neither card is out yet.

Will this at all cause Nvidia to drop their prices? That's all that matters to me since I am green team for life.

@personandstuff: going from a 7950 to a 980 was definitely worth it, so to do that at 400$ less?? If this thing really runs like a 980 when paired paires with an i5 or i7 youll be getting 60fps 1080 at mostly max settings. For 1080p i dont think there is a better deal, however it will be the baseline or slightly over for vr and will do ok at high mid settings at 1440p (if its on par with a 980).

@vortextk: Yeah, I had the same setup. 4870s were awesome in price-to-performance terms - One of the best GPUs I've ever owned.

Nice price for a card that competes with a GTX 970-980. I think I am going to splurge on a 1080 though by end of year, or early next year. Might get a Vive if VR actually turns into something cool, and gets some real software for it.

Wondering who ends up selling better. AMD or Nvidia for these new gen cards. Read Nvidia cards sold out within mins on the new cards pretty much everywhere.

Looks like a hell of a card for $200, 5 tflops would put it around a 980. Hopefully this will help keep the pricing of the 1070 honest.

@puchiko: You pledge allegiance to a company for life instead of judging products on their own merit?

I think it's a good move on their part to show their mid-range solution before unveiling their enthusiast offering. It's an exciting time for people looking for a new GPU, that's for sure.

They make higher quality products, and have better drivers. AMD has really yet to hold a lead on either of those fronts. Its not a crazy statement. They make a much better product, but for some the low price of AMD offsets that. If you could pick a card, and cost was not a factor, I dont think anyone would go with AMD.