Here are some of the first pictures of the Radeon RX 480 Nitro, and a reference-derived semi-custom graphics card by Sapphire. The RX 480 Nitro features a new dual-fan aluminium fin-stack cooling solution by Sapphire, with what looks like a metal cooler shroud featuring brushed aluminium finish, and a pair of 100 mm fans ventilating a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink. The company is also working on a card that's similar in design to AMD's reference card, with a few cosmetic changes, such as a glowing "Sapphire" logo instead of "Radeon," and a back-plate. The Radeon RX 480 is expected to go on sale a little later this month.

AMD put out press pictures (for now renders) of its reference-design Radeon RX 480 board. The pictures reveal a very compact reference PCB, which draws power from just a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, and which uses a 5+2 phase VRM to power the card. The ASIC package is about the size of the "Tonga," and is surrounded by 8 memory chips. Display connectors include three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.0a. The blower-type reference cooler has to cope with a card with a typical board power of just 150W despite high clock speeds, and so we expect this to be a very cool and quiet card. We expect AMD to allow its add-in board (AIB) partners to come up with custom-design coolers from day one, and so the combination of this 150W card with the likes of IceQ X, VaporX, or TwinFrozr VI can only be blissful.

AMD made a bold move in launching its first "Polaris" architecture based performance-segment GPU, the Radeon RX 480 at a starting price of US $199. The company claims that it will perform on-par with $500 graphics cards from the previous generation, directly hinting at performance being on par with the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Nano. Although it's not in the league of the GTX 1070 or the GTX 1080, this level of performance at $199 could certainly disrupt things for NVIDIA, as it presents an attractive option for people still gaming on 1440p and 1080p resolutions (the overwhelming majority). The R9 Fury can handle any game at 1440p.

The Radeon RX 480 is based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" silicon, fabbed by GlobalFoundries. It's publicly known that GloFlo has a 14 nm fab in Malta (upstate New York), USA. The RX 480 is based on AMD's 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, codenamed "Polaris." It features 2,304 stream processors, spread across 36 compute units (CUs). Its single-precision floating point performance is rated by AMD to be "greater than 5 TFLOP/s." The chip features a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with memory clocked at 8 Gbps, yielding memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. There will be two variants of this card, 4 GB and 8 GB. It's the 4 GB variant that starts at $199, the 8 GB variant is expected to be priced at $229. AMD confirmed that the GPU will support DisplayPort 1.4 although it's certified up to DisplayPort 1.3. The typical board power is rated at 150W. The card could be available from 29th June.

It looks like AMD is deviating from its top-level performance-grading, with its next-generation Radeon graphics cards. The company has maintained the Radeon R3 series for embedded low-power APUs, Radeon R5 for integrated graphics solutions of larger APUs; Radeon R7 for entry-thru-mainstream discrete GPUs (eg: R7 360, R7 370); and Radeon R9 for performance-thru-enthusiast segment (eg: R9 285, R9 290X). The new nomenclature could see it rely on the second set of model numbers (eg: 4#0) to denote market-positioning, if a popular rumor on tech bulletin boards such as Reddit holds true.

A Redditor posted an image of a next-gen AMD Radeon demo machine powered by a "Radeon RX 480." Either "X" could be a variable, or it could be series-wide, prefixing all SKUs in the 400 series. It could also be AMD marketing's way of somehow playing with the number 10 (X), to establish some kind of generational parity with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series. The placard also depicts a new "Radeon" logo with a different, sharper typeface. The "RX 480" was apparently able to run "Doom" (2016) at 2560x1440 @ 144 Hz, with the OpenGL API.