Radeon R9 490X as fast as Geforce GTX 980 Ti - at half the price

At the end of 2011, AMD introduced the 28-nanometer Graphics Core Next (GCN) graphics architecture with the Radeon HD 7970. Since then, GCN has undergone a number of minor revisions but is largely unchanged, something that will change with Polaris, which in addition to real architectural improvements takes the step to 14 nanometers.

While AMD is expected to have made extensive changes in order to achieve higher performance per stream processor, energy efficiency should be an equally important focus area. The company’s representatives have also announced that pricing will be aggressive in relation to today’s graphics cards.

Now Game Debate reports that AMD has held an event for the media behind closed doors in Taiwan. One of the big news from there will be that Polaris 10, the circuit that is believed to house the Radeon R9 490X and R9 490, will win 4,000 points in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra / 4K. This is on par with the Radeon R9 Fury X and Nvidia’s enthusiast model Geforce GTX 980 Ti.

Interestingly, the Polaris 10 is not a replacement for the Fiji used in the Fury series, but for the Grenada in the Radeon R9 390 and R9 390X. This also applies to the price that is speculated to be in the region of 300 dollars, less than half compared to the Geforce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X which have recommended prices of 649 dollars.

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Furthermore, it is said that AMD Polaris 10 will have 2,560 stream processors with Radeon R9 490X and 2,304 pieces for R9 490. The type of memory that will be used by the duo is not yet known, although most point to GDDR5 or GDDR5X. This includes a maximum power consumption of 175 W, which should be lower in most scenarios.

The regular replacement for Fiji will be delayed until next year with Vega, which will use HBM2 memory for up to 1 TB / s of memory bandwidth. Before that, it’s time for Polaris 10 and the smaller sibling Polaris 11, which is expected to make an entry just in time for or around Computex 2016 at the end of May.