AMD announces Radeon RX 470 and RX 460

The battle between AMD and Nvidia over consumers’ wallets is usually fought first and foremost in the upper price range, and then looks down to lower. For this generation, however, AMD chose to start in the upper middle class with the Radeon RX 480, which will soon be joined by two lower priced models.

Specifications: AMD Radeon RX 470 and RX 460

It is about Radeon RX 470 and RX 460, where the first is built around the same graphics circuit as RX 480. The difference is that it is a scaled-down variant with a lower number of stream processors and texture units – 2,048 and 128 respectively. This includes 32 raster units, the same as for the RX 480.

The base frequency for the Radeon RX 470 is 926 MHz with a maximum turbo frequency of 1,206 MHz, corresponding to a theoretical reduction in performance of 15 percent compared to the RX 480. Furthermore, the graphics memory is a 256-bit memory bus and 4 GB GDDR5 memory in 6,600 MHz for bandwidth 211.2 GB / s. The power consumption is set to 120 W, which is the same as for Nvidia’s new Geforce GTX 1060.

It is worth noting that the specifications do not fully correspond to what AMD communicated to SweClockers and other media during its Polaris event in Macao at the end of May. Then there was talk of an estimated power consumption of 110 W and a memory frequency of 7,000 MHz (224 GB / s).

Unlike the Radeon RX 480 which is heavily marketed as an affordable solution for virtual reality, the RX 470 aims for the middle class and gaming in 1080p resolution, where gaming with high settings in modern, popular game titles is said to be possible at over 60 frames per second (fps) .

The Radeon RX 460 builds around the smaller Polaris 11 graphics circuit, which comes with 1,024 stream processors, 64 texture units, 16 raster units and a 128-bit memory bus. For the graphics card in question, however, AMD has chosen to use a scaled-down variant with 896 stream processors and 56 texture units, which may mean that a faster variant is to be expected later in the future.

Furthermore, the graphics card has 2 or 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and the power consumption is set to less than 75 W, which means that no extra power supply is required via a 6-pin PCI Express cable. AMD points out, however, that many partner manufacturers will release more lavish and overclocked variants that also have this.

Unlike the Radeon RX 480 and RX 470, AMD does not talk about good performance in the latest AAA titles. The focus of the RX 460 is instead to deliver good performance in popular E-sports games at a low price.

However, Polaris 11 is primarily intended for laptops and even here the graphics circuit will be marketed under the same brand as the desktop equivalent. The first known design win is one in HP’s game-oriented series Omen, which is expected to appear within the next few weeks.

Price and availability

Today’s announcement is first followed by the launch of the Radeon RX 470 on August 4, closely followed by the RX 460 four days later. None of the models will be sold with AMD’s own reference design, but it will be entirely up to the partner to develop and market variants with tailor-made circuit boards and cooling solutions.

AMD has chosen to keep the details of the pricing for both models, but promises to announce these in connection with each launch.