Top technology companies AMD and Nvidia are ready to put out their latest graphics cards, giving users a tough decision as to which of the new offerings they should buy.
The two rivals have unveiled the AMD Radeon RX 480 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, both billed to support Virtual Reality (VR) gaming as well as intense play.
For those whose deal breaker is the pricing, the AMD Radeon RX 480 should be the obvious choice, seeing that its premium 8GB edition is only $229 whereas the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is expected to be around $599.
Of course, there's a reason behind that massive gap. According to Neurogadget, Nvidia's graphics card is fitted out with "VR-specific rendering techniques."
Since the GeForce GTX 1080 is based on the new and powerful Pascal architecture, it is integrated with features called the Single Pass Stereo and Simultaneous Multi-Projection to enhance the projection of the virtual reality world.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 reduces the size of the render windows to shorten the time used in rendering the graphics, allowing the frame rate of VR games to double.
As for the potentials in the VR department of the AMD Radeon RX 480, which is based on Polaris 10 aka AMD's finest, Moor Insights & Strategy's principal analyst Patrick Moorhead imagines an influx of VR-supported devices with its prominence.
"Radeon RX Series has the potential to propel VR-ready systems into retail in higher volumes, drive new levels of VR content investment, and even drive down the cost of VR headsets," Moorhead said.
On paper, the AMD Radeon RX 480 is the inferior graphics card at 5.8 teraflops. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 generates a mind-blowing 9 teraflops.
This also means the latter has higher core clock at 1607 MHz as compared to the former's 1266 MHz. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is based on a16nm FinFET architecture while the AMD Radeon RX 480 uses the 14nm FinFET.
Nvidia's latest graphics cards were released last month while AMD Radeon RX 480 will hit the stores on June 29.
