Thursday, June 23rd 2016
AMD Radeon RX 470 Could Surprise with Pricing
AMD could deal yet another shock to NVIDIA after the Radeon RX 480, with its smaller sibling, the Radeon RX 470. This card is expected to be priced at $149 for the 4 GB variant, and $179 for the 8 GB variant. The card is rumored to feature 2,048 stream processors, spread acrosss 32 compute units, down from the 2,304 stream processors of the RX 480. Its memory ticks slower, at 7 Gbps, with a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s. The most spectacular specification, however, is its typical board power, which is rated at 110W. The card should be faster than at least the R9 380X, and at its given specs, offer a very interesting option for 1080p gamers, at $149.
Sources:
WCCFTech, VideoCardz
67 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 470 Could Surprise with Pricing
This is nvidia:
Raise your hand if you're surprised that the RX470 is cheaper than the RX480
I wonder if this would crossfire with older R9 380(x) though. That would be interesting, especially as I have one of those, with 4GB memory just like the RX 470.
If it had been only 25 bucks cheaper, everyone would go for its bigger brother. It had to be a fair amount cheaper to differentiate it from the 480.
Although i'm still skeptical about this.
Crossfire/SLI implementations are very driver dependent meaning that a lot of the work is put in the hands of AMD and Nvidia. Yet not all games support multi GPU.
With DX12, we get three modes of multi GPU and two of them, including the one we're discussing here, is all in the hands of the developer. How likely are we to see developers with the skill and time to implement this properly and then there's budget constraints to go along with it. I just don't see it happening. If they couldn't do it before, how could they do it now?
DX12 also has a mode called Implicit Multi Adapter. The idea is similar to Crossfire/SLI and will also be driver dependent. I'm guessing most developers who will implement multi GPU support will use this to save time and effort by putting the ball in the court of hardware vendors.
So in summary:
RX 480 - 2304 cores - 1266 MHz - 8Gbps 256-bit - $199
RX 470 - 1792 cores - 1150-1200 MHz - 6-6.5Gbps 256-bit - $149
RX 460 - 1024 cores - 1200-1250 MHz - 8Gbps 128-bit - $99
If yes, then ... YES!
And no, going lower level never eases implementation.