AMD has officially announced its newest and affordable gaming and VR-ready GPU, the Radeon RX 480. The new GPU will be offered for US$199 for its 4GB variant and around US$230 for its 8GB variant. It is scheduled to be released on June 29.
The company made the announcement during the Computex 2016, where it boasted its premium VR-capable GPU that will not break the bank. Other GPUs with similar specs hang around the US$500 price point. The RX 480 is also the first GPU that uses the 14nm FinFET process technology.
Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, said, "VR is the most eagerly anticipated development in immersive computing ever, and is the realization of AMD's Cinema 2.0 vision that predicted the convergence of immersive experiences and interactivity back in 2008."
Koduri added, "As we look to fully connect and immerse humanity through VR, cost remains the daylight between VR being only for the select few, and universal access for everyone. The Radeon™ RX Series is a disruptive technology that adds rocket fuel to the VR inflection point, turning it into a technology with transformational relevance to consumers."
AMD's release of the RX 480 will make VR-ready desktops and notebooks more enticing to the consumers, which will greatly expand VR's audience. The company believes that everybody wants to experience virtual reality, but machines capable of delivering such an experience do not go below US$999, and not everybody can afford that. Now, many will be considering getting one with their new card.
VideoCardz added that the Radeon RX 480 is based on the Polaris-architecture and the 8GB variant, with GDDR 5 RAM clocked at 2000 MHZ (8 GHZ effective), with 2304 Stream processors and a memory of 256 GB/s, similar to NVIDIA's GTX 1070.
Furthermore, the new GPU has a compute performance of around 5.5 Teraflops and consumes around 150W of power.
Fans can expect gaming performance reviews with the AMD Radeon RX 480 once it is available on the market.
