ROG STRIX RX 480 8G Review: Controller, UVD, VCE and Watt | Polaris Graphics Card

AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB Review | Display controller, UVD, VCE and Watt

New control screen

We’ve already covered some of the Polaris display console improvements in this article. “AMD GPU Career Development Plans in 2016” … But it was posted nearly seven months ago.

At the time, we learned that Polaris would support DisplayPort 1.3 with a high bitrate 3, using existing cables and connectors to deliver up to 32.4 Gbps over four lanes. The console specification now includes the DisplayPort 1.4-HDR standard. It does not increase the bitrate, but it does include Display Stream Compression 1.2 technology, which can render 10-bit 4K content at a refresh rate of 96Hz. Also, the DisplayPort 1.4 standard supports the color space.

In the short term, AMD is still looking at DP 1.3 as a tool to implement FreeSync in 4K. According to the company, the boards will be available with a refresh rate of 120 Hz by the end of 2016, but in order to achieve good performance with high graphics settings in this configuration, the odds are AMD Radeon RX 480 will not be enough. However, the Vega processor design with HBM2 support will not officially appear until 2017.

We discussed HDR support at Polaris late last year, but AMD confirms that the display pipeline is ready for the first generation of 10-bit HDR displays, and 12-bit HDR displays in the future. The easy-to-program color block includes gamma reset, gamma control, floating point processing, and 1:1 projection with any screen.

Video encoding/decoding acceleration

During its heyday, ATI was known for its performance and quality of video decoding acceleration systems that transformed video playback tasks from the central processor into a set of programmable shaders and static function blocks installed in the GPU.

We don’t have details on where the Polaris decoder completes its tasks, but it’s known to be based on a UVD decoder and appears to have consistent functionality. AMD specifies in the specs that you have HEVC decoding up to 4K60 using a Main 10 profile, which supports 10-bit 4:2:0 (all of which are required for HDR playback). There is hardware support for VP9 decoding, though the AMD drivers haven’t implemented it yet, we only know that the feature is planned in a future update. If AMD wants to implement HEVC 10-bit / 4: 2: 0 color downsampling with HDR, at least 2-profile compatibility is required. M-JPEG hardware acceleration up to 4K30 is also available.

The development of AMD Video Encoder (VCE – Video Coding Engine) is also not well documented. Polaris is known for its ability to encode 8-bit HEVC video up to 4K60, but GPUs based on the GCN 1.2 architecture have the same hardware. AMD appears to be expanding the list of VCE-compatible apps. Of course, the Gaming Evolved special client is supported. But apart from that, the lists include Open Broadcaster Software, which previously only supported QuickSync and NVEnc. There’s also Plays.tv, a social network from the company behind the Gaming Evolved client.

At the end of June this year, AMD announced a line of new Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs, which are based on the most advanced 14nm FinFET processing technology. At the moment, among the video cards released on new graphics processors, there are three models: AMD Radeon RX 480, AMD Radeon RX 470 and AMD Radeon RX 460. In today’s article, we will briefly review the reference model of the old video card and its comprehensive test.

Since all theoretical calculations about the architecture of the new Polaris GPUs have long been published by other resources, today we will not dwell on this topic. Just note briefly that the main innovations in the updated architecture of the fourth generation of Graphics Core Next relate to improved geometry and video encoding and decoding blocks, support for asynchronous arithmetic operations in DirectX 12, support for Vulkan API, more efficient data compression methods, increased power efficiency, and support for output Video DisplayPort 1.4. -HDR, HDMI 2.0b and much more.