Yesterday evening, AMD's new generation of flagship graphics card RX 480 was on sale, and JD Mall was the first to launch five. The pre-sales had all been sold out. In addition to Asustek's sale of 2,499 yuan, the other is the official price of 1999 yuan.
The new card specifications have been disclosed before. Based on the Polaris architecture of the 14nm FinFET process, the 28nm compared to the previous generation R9390 and R9380 is undoubtedly the biggest advancement, directly reflected in the reduction of power consumption. Due to the reduction of power consumption and heat generation, the core frequency has correspondingly increased significantly, which is about 25% higher than the previous generation.
With the new GCN 4.0 architecture, native support for Microsoft DX12, support for LiquidVR technology and HDR technology, and a new version of the Crimson driver. Memory is 8G GDDR5, 256bit wide and up to 8GHz.
It seems that the card body is very long, about 25cm, in fact, the graphics card PCB itself is not long, turbo radiator at least beyond the length of a fan, small chassis users do not worry, can wait for the follow-up non-public version. Use a 6Pin interface for power supply. A power supply rated at 400W or above is recommended.
The public version of the RX 480 has VGA, DVI, 3 DP 1.4 and 1 HDMI 2.0b interfaces, supports HBR in DP 1.3 mode, supports HDR in DP 1.4 mode, and DP 1.4 interface supports up to 3840x2160 resolution 96Hz refresh rate, HDMI 2.0b interface supports up to 60Hz refresh rate of 3840x2160 resolution, very much look forward to DP 1.4 performance on VR devices.
We have come up with AMD's previous high-end graphics cards for comparison, and similar performance of the N-card GTX 970 and the new card GTX 1070, by the way adding 4G memory RX 480, to see how the actual game performance.
Overall, the gaming performance of the AMD RX 480 is better suited to work at 1080p resolution than 1440p. The performance at 1080p is significantly stronger, and Crysis 3 can approach 60 fps even with the highest picture quality. At 1440p, it feels a bit overwhelmed. Only DiRT Rally's game is slightly over 60fps. If you often run the game with 1080p resolution, the budget is about 2,000 yuan, RX 480 is a good choice.
Although AMD's new driver for the RX 480 is stable in most cases, it encountered some problems when running GTA V. There is a bug in the current driver that affects all GCN 1.1 architectures and subsequent graphics cards, causing intermittent game screens and degraded performance, while the 380X crashes completely. AMD has found the problem and started repairing the driver.
In the second part of the game performance tests, the RX 480 gradually narrowed the gap between the R9 390 and the GTX 970. With different screen settings, the RX 480 performance is slightly higher than that of the DX11, but the driver has yet to be furthered. optimization.
For mainstream graphics users, this means that the previous generation of high-end cards will soon fall into the mainstream price.
From the test results, the performance improvement is mainly based on the frequency increase brought by the 14nm process, and the benefits obtained from the GCN 4 architecture are limited. At present, it seems that the biggest advantage is the DX12 native support and VR support.
However, as far as users are concerned, as long as the performance is powerful and cheap, is it because of 14nm or GCN 4? At present, the RX 480 is priced at 1999 yuan, which is a lot more than the psychological expectation of 199 US dollars at the beginning. However, this is an 8G memory version, which is more suitable for dual-card fires. If there is a high-resolution VR device, it can also play an advantage of big memory. . The 4G memory card will soon catch up, and it is estimated that the price range will be between 1699-1799 yuan. If you just play the game under 1080p, you can wait for this.