The AMD Radeon RX 480 Preview: Polaris Makes Its Mainstream Mark
by Ryan Smith on June 29, 2016 9:00 AM EST
Back in December of last year, AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group began slowly trickling out the plans for what would be their first GPU architecture built for the now-modern FinFET processes: Polaris. As part of a broader change in how GPU architectures have been handled – more information is now released ahead of launch – AMD laid out what they wanted to do with Polaris. Aim for the mainstream, radically improve power efficiency, lay the groundwork for HDR displays, and, of course, improve performance.
Now six months later we are seeing AMD’s plans come to fruition, as the Polaris GPUs are in full production, and the first retail products are launching today. Kicking off the Polaris generation in the desktop market will be AMD’s Radeon RX 480, which is aiming for the mainstream market. We’ve already seen the card, the price, and AMD’s marketing spiel back at Computex 2016, so now it’s time to take a look at the final, retail hardware.
| AMD Radeon GPU Specification Comparison | ||||||
| AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) | AMD Radeon RX 480 (4GB) | AMD Radeon R9 390 | AMD Radeon R9 380 | |||
| Stream Processors | 2304 (36 CUs) |
2560 (40 CUs) |
1792 (28 CUs) |
|||
| Texture Units | 144 | 160 | 112 | |||
| ROPs | 32 | 64 | 32 | |||
| Base Clock | 1120MHz | N/A | N/A | |||
| Boost Clock | 1266MHz | 1000MHz | 970MHz | |||
| Memory Clock | 7-8 Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 5Gbps GDDR5 | 5.5Gbps GDDR5 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 512-bit | 256-bit | |||
| VRAM | 8GB | 4GB | 8GB | 2GB | ||
| Transistor Count | 5.7B | 6.2B | 5.0B | |||
| Typical Board Power | 150W | 275W | 190W | |||
| Manufacturing Process | GloFo 14nm FinFET | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | |||
| Architecture | GCN 4 | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.2 | |||
| GPU | Polaris 10 | Hawaii | Tonga | |||
| Launch Date | 06/29/16 | 06/18/15 | 06/18/15 | |||
| Launch Price | $239 | $199 | $329 | $199 | ||
At the highest level, the RX 480 is based off of a fully enabled version of AMD’s Polaris 10 GPU. This is the first Polaris GPU to hit the market, and is the larger of the two GPUs. The total transistor count is 5.7 billion, which takes up 232mm2 on GlobalFoundries’ 14nm FinFET process. That this GPU is built at GloFo and not TSMC is a significant departure for AMD, who previously has used partner TSMC just shy of forever, and is the first time AMD and NVIDIA haven’t used the same fab in some 13 years. We’ll touch upon the foundry issue more in the full review, but the important thing to take away right now is that with the split in foundries, it’s no longer architecture alone that dictates whether a given NVIDIA or AMD GPU is better; process now plays a part, and the playing field is no longer even.
As it’s using a full Polaris 10 GPU, the RX 480 ships with all 36 CUs (2304 SPs) enabled. Ignoring architectural efficiency for the moment, this puts it somewhere between the Radeon R9 390 (Hawaii) and Radeon R9 380 (Tonga) in terms of CU count, with AMD having spent a good chunk of their 14nm density gains on adding CUs. Note that the CUs themselves have not substantially changed – it’s still 64 stream processors and 4 texture units per CU – which is where the 144 texture unit counts comes from.
On the backend of things, RX 480 is equipped with 32 ROPs. This is fewer than Hawaii’s 64 ROPs, but it is consistent with mainstream parts, as ROP needs don’t scale nearly as quickly from one generation to the next like compute (CU) needs. These 32 ROPs are paired with 2MB of L2 cache, which is twice as much L2 cache per ROP as the bulk of AMD’s last-gen lineup. The increased L2 cache has a die space cost – which is now easier to pay with the 14nm process – and helps to improve performance and cut power consumption by keeping more data on-die.
However once you go off-die, you will run into RX 480’s VRAM, which is a small story in and of itself. Once again common for mainstream AMD cards, AMD has stuck with a 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus here. Attached to this bus is either 4GB or 8GB of VRAM, with AMD offering two capacities for RX 480. The reason for offering multiple capacities is that AMD wants to hit the $199 price point with the card – the traditional sweet spot for mainstream cards – which would be hard to do with an 8GB card at this time. By offering both, AMD can hit that price while offering a full 8GB card at a slightly higher price for buyers with a bit more flexibility and/or greater VRAM needs.
Where things get tricky here however is the memory speeds. Officially, 7Gbps GDDR5 is the minimum speed for both RX 480 capacities, and this is the speed that AMD’s 4GB reference card runs at. However for their 8GB reference card, AMD has opted to ship the card with faster 8Gbps memory in order to further boost performance. I suspect that AMD would have liked to have used 8Gbps memory throughout, but the aforementioned price target required AMD to make some concessions to comfortably reach it. Otherwise for the higher priced 8GB card, AMD didn’t need to pinch pennies, and as a result they were able to ship it with 8Gbps memory.
| AMD Radeon RX480 Memory Bandwidth | |||||
| AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB Reference | AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB Reference | AMD Radeon RX 480 Min Requirements | |||
| Memory Clock | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | ||
| Total Mem Bandwidth | 256GB/sec | 224GB/sec | 224GB/sec | ||
| VRAM | 8GB | 4GB | 4/8GB | ||
The end result is that we have an odd schism between AMD’s card requirements and what they actually ship. The reference 4GB RX 480 meets the RX 480 minimum specifications, whereas the reference 8GB card is de facto overclocked relative to those same specifications. As we’ll see in our benchmark results, the difference in performance isn’t too great, but I don’t think this is an ideal outcome for consumers. My biggest concern right now is what happens when AMD’s partners start shipping their custom cards; if they opt for slower memory buses, then this would mean that custom 8GB cards could end up slightly underperforming the official reference card. But we’ll have to see how that plays out.
Moving on, let’s talk about power consumption. As AMD has made clear over the last several months, one of the major goals of Polaris was power efficiency, and this is where we see some of the first payoffs from that decision. RX 480’s official Typical Board Power (TBP) is 150W, over 20% lower than the last-generation R9 380, and 45% lower than the otherwise performance-comparable R9 390. Consequently the card only requires a single 6-pin PCIe power connector for external power, making it a more friendly option for power-limited desktops that don’t offer additional power connectors.
In terms of design, the reference RX 480 is a double-wide, blower-style card measuring 9.5-inches long. Notably, this is the first AMD retail reference card since the Radeon R9 290 series to use a blower, giving AMD the opportunity to show that they’ve learned from 290’s excesses and that the company can build a better blower. Given AMD’s mainstream ambitions, a blower makes a lot of sense for a $199, 150W card, as a fully exhausting card is going to be the most compatible with the wide variety of desktop designs out there. AMD doesn’t need to worry about whether the cooling built into the chassis can handle 150W of heat, since the card can remove the vast majority of the heat on its own. The blower design does add some length to the card though; the PCB is only 7-inches long, while the space requirements for the radial fan push the card out to the full 9.5-inches.
For connectivity, buyers will find 3 DisplayPorts and an HDMI port; AMD has done away with the DVI port for their reference design. As this is a new card on a new architecture, both port types support their latest respective standards. For DisplayPort this means support for the 1.3 and 1.4 standards, adding the newest, fastest HBR3 signaling mode, along with full HDR support. Meanwhile for the HDMI support, HDMI 2.0b is supported, offering 4Kp60 support with HDR.
For today’s launch, this is going to be a full reference launch. All of AMD’s partners are shipping AMD’s reference design in 4GB and 8GB capacities, which means the differences between the vendors will come down to pack-in items, support, and whether anyone charges a premium for the aforementioned items. Card availability is said to be good, but at this point I’m going to be surprised if most retailers don’t sell out by the end of the day, as these days it’s rare for video cards not to sell out, even mainstream cards. Looking at the slightly longer term, AMD isn’t able to state exactly when we’ll see custom RX 480 boards hit the market, but from what I gather it will be sooner rather than later.
Moving on, with two different capacities there are two different prices for the RX 480. The entry level 4GB card will be launching at the previously unveiled price of $199. Meanwhile the 8GB card will launch at $239, a $40 price premium for the extra 4GB of memory and the higher memory frequency. I do not have a good idea of what the split is between 4GB and 8GB cards, but I suspect that it will be the 8GB cards that are more plentiful.
Finally, looking at the competitive landscape, just as was the case last month with NVIDIA’s GTX 1000 series and the high-end market, the Radeon RX 480 series is launching uncontested into the mainstream market. At least for the time being all of NVIDIA’s products are positioned well above the RX 480 – with GTX 1070 starting at $399 – which means what competition there is for AMD is composed of last-generation 28nm cards, particularly the GTX 970 and GTX 960. As these are last-generation cards, neither one is strictly comparable to the RX 480, and in the long run these cards have a limited shelf life as they’re due to be discontinued sooner than later.
| Summer 2016 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
| AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
| $659 | GeForce GTX 1080 | ||||
| $429 | GeForce GTX 1070 | ||||
| Radeon R9 390X | $329 | ||||
| $259 | GeForce GTX 970 | ||||
| Radeon RX 480 (8GB) | $239 | ||||
| Radeon RX 480 (4GB) | $199 | ||||
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Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Why wouldn't you use data for NVIDIA's GPUs to try to determine the GTX 1060's performance rather than use data from AMD's GPUs? The experience from the 700 series and the 900 series implies that, assuming that the 1060 has two GPCs (half that of the 1080) it should be about 20% faster than the 970 in DX 11 games and so about 20% faster than the RX 480. Pascal seems to be doing better in DX 12 than Maxwell, so it may end up being close to 20% faster than RX 480 in DX 12 games, too.dragonsqrrl - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I'm not using AMDs GPUs to determine the performance of the 1060, I'm using the 1070 and 1080. What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that I've assumed roughly 50% 1080 performance (or around the 970) for the 1060. The RX480 leaks prior to launch suggested 390X-like performance, which led me to believe the 1060 would probably perform a step below it. Apparently the leaks were a bit exaggerated, so I now think the 1060 will be more competitive against the RX480 than I did before.I'm actually curious why your estimate is so different. Am I missing something?
Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
OK, first let's look at the 900 series. The GTX 980 was released on September 18, 2014 for $549. It has a 2048:128:64 configuration @ 1126 MHz base clock for 4612 SP throughput. The GTX 970 was released on September 18, 2014 for $329. It has a 1664:104:56 core configuration @ 1050 MHz for 3494 SP throughput. The GTX 960 was released January 22, 2015 for $199. It has a 1024:64:32 core configuration @ 1127 MHz base clock for 2308 SP throughput.
Relative: performance - 980 is 1.32 times 970, price - 980 is 1.67 times 970. performance - 980 is 2 times 960, price - 980 is 2.76 times 960. performance - 970 is 1.51 times 960, price - 970 is 1.65 times 960.
Now the 10 series. GTX 1080 was just recently released and will presumably be available soon for $599. It has a 2560:160:64 configuration @ 1607 MHz for SP throughput of 8228. GTX 1070 was just recently released and will presumably be available soon for $379. It has a 1920:120:64 configuration @ 1506 MHz for SP throughput of 5783. Now the GTX 1060 is rumored to have a 1280:80:48 configuration. It will probably have a clock very close to the 1080 judging by the 900 series clocks. That would give it an SP throughput of 4114. Relative: performance - 980 is 1.42 times 1070, price - 1080 is 1.58 times 1070. speculative: performance - 1080 is 2 times 1060. performance - 1070 is 1.41 times 1060.
Now the GTX 1070 has SP throughput that is 25% more than the GTX 980. It performs 20% to 40% faster than the 980 (in DX11 games. More in DX12 games), averaging more than 30% faster. 4114 SP throughput for the GTX 1060 would make it give it 18% more than the GTX 970. It should then average about 25% faster in DX11 games, and so more than 20% faster than the RX 480.
Now, I know that you were only interested in how I got the performance numbers for the 1060, but I decided to include an argument for pricing as well while I was at it:
The 1070 has a performance/price ratio of 1.11 wrt to the 1080. The 970 has a performance/price ratio of 1.27 wrt to the 980. The 960 has a performance/price ratio of 1.38 wrt the 980. The 960 has a performance/price ratio of 1.09 wrt the 970. You can see the 1070 is priced a lot closer to the 1080 compared to the 970's price relative to the 980, despite the 970 being closer to the 980 in performance compared with the relative performance of 1070 and 1080. The question is why is this the case? Does it have to do something with the defect density of the 14nm node, or something else? My guess is it has to do with the success of the 970 and the amount of competition from AMD in the space the cards occupy. The 970 was enourmously successful, and NVIDIA wants to push up the average selling price of the replacement card if they can, in order to tap into the prior success of the x70 card. Additionally, when the 980 and 970 were released, AMD had more competition for the 970 than for the 980. Therefore the 980 could be prices relatively higher. Now AMD does not really have competition for both the 1080 and the 1070, allowing both those cards to be priced higher. The 1060, however, faces competition. Therefore I think that the expected pricing of the 1060 would be to remain close to the relative price/performance ratio of the 960 wrt the 980, a card with competition compared with a card without much competition, rather than remain closer to the relative price/performance ratio of the 960 wrt the 970, which were both cards with competition. If we divide the price ratio of the 980 to 960 with the performance ratio of the 980 to 960 we get 2.76/2 = 1.38. This represents a conversion factor that will convert relative performance to relative price, under the assumption that the relative price performance ratio of the 980 to 960 also holds for the 1080 to 1060. Since I speculated that the 1080 will have 2 times the performance of the 1060, the 1080 would then cost 2.76 times the 1060 under these assumptions. Since the 1080 costs $599, the 1060 would be expected to cost about $217.
$217 obviously leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for upward pricing pressure of the 1060, such as it falling closer in line with the 1070 price for whaetever reason, and still be well below the $300 that many seem to be claiming. But the point is that a $220 GTX 1060 performing 25% faster than the GTX 970 is well within the range of reasonable expectations given the recent historical data of NVIDIA's cards. If anything the GTX 1080 has even less competition than the GTX 980 had, suggesting the converstion factor might actually be greater (But I doubt it. The 1080 can't be found for the $599 at the moment and part of the reason for that is that the 1080 doesn't have any competition. That larger conversion factor is factored into the actual real world prices but probably not the MSRPs.) So the RX 480 seems to exert no extra pricing pressure on the GTX 1060 than AMD's offerings exerted on the GTX 960 when the GTX 960 was released.
dragonsqrrl - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
"Relative: performance - 980 is 1.42 times 1070, price - 1080 is 1.58 times 1070. speculative: performance - 1080 is 2 times 1060. performance - 1070 is 1.41 times 1060."There's something wrong here. If the 1060 is roughly equal to the 980, and the 1080 is 2x the performance of the 1060, the 1080 would also have to be 2x the performance of the 980, which it isn't. I'm not exactly sure where the ratios or logic went wrong, but there's clearly an inconsistency there. The 1080 is about 1.65x the performance of the 980, and about 1.95x the performance of the 970. I'm not using theoretical SP performance, I'm basing this primarily off of real world DX11 performance at 1440p. This is why I assumed it would perform closer to the 970, because it's roughly 50% the performance of the 1080.
Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
" If the 1060 is roughly equal to the 980, and the 1080 is 2x the performance of the 1060, the 1080 would also have to be 2x the performance of the 980, which it isn't."There's pretty obviously a typo there. The organization of the information should lead you to know it's a typo. It should read: ""Relative: performance - 1080 is 1.42 times 1070, price - 1080 is 1.58 times 1070. speculative: performance - 1080 is 2 times 1060. performance - 1070 is 1.41 times 1060." Does that clear things up?
" The 1080 is about 1.65x the performance of the 980, and about 1.95x the performance of the 970."
Does that contradict my information? If it does, then show how. It doesn't seem relevant to me, because you don't directly argue against the cross-generational comparison I did make. I established the relative performance of the 10 series to the 900 series by comparing the 1070 to the 980. The 1070 performs on average 30% faster than the 980 in real world games. The relative performance of the cards within their architecture is closely related to their theoretical performance.
"I'm not using theoretical SP performance"
Without considering theoretical performance there's no way whatsoever you can guess the performance of the 1060 because at this point theoretical performance of the 1060 is all we have information for.
sonicmerlin - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
Yojimbo almost certainly has Aspergers. And yet you read everything he wrote. JesusYojimbo - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
Why wouldn't you want to read something that's right? Jesuscrimson117 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Go away, troll. Don't just post shit like that without backing it up. When can we get downvote buttons on AT comments?"Wrapping things up then, today’s launch of the Radeon RX 480 leaves AMD is in a good position. They have the mainstream market to themselves, and RX 480 is a strong showing for their new Polaris architecture. AMD will have to fend off NVIDIA at some point, but for now they can sit back and enjoy another successful launch."
atlantico - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
He's not wrong, for $200-240 the best GPU on the market is AMD RX480. For "backing that up" check the benchmarks in the article.crimson117 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
I was referring to the OP's comment "What a massive F-Up by AMD"