So AMD has just officially revealed the RX 480, their first Polaris-based graphics card…
And the TL;DR is ~80% the TFLOPS of the GTX 1070, at about ~50% the price… which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. The biggest caveat is that the base model will only have 4GB of GDDR5, half of what the 1070 is rocking. There will be a model with 8GB as well, but there's no word yet on how much that'll add to the price (though I've heard rumors and speculation that it only adds $50 to the pricetag, which would mean it's still a great deal vs 1070).Whether 4GB of vram is enough is debatable… but I think it's probably fine for now. More ambitious VR experiences might suffer though. I'm still rocking 3GB of VRAM in my 780 Ti SLI setup, and it still holds up well today.I'll probably wait until the next wave of cards before upgrading… I want a sub $300 card that thoroughly trounces my current config. We're getting close, but we're not quite there yet. What about you guys (and/or gals)?
I'm probably not going to upgrade from my GTX 770 for some time - no real need. If I'm mysteriously rolling in cash next year I might consider a new build if Zen is good enough.
Hm… this might have to be my first hardware upgrade if they release an 8GB one. I've got an R9 390 right now, but I'd definitely swap it with that instead if the performance is good enough.
I've been planning to jump to a GTX 1080 whenever the non-reference models come out. I want to pick up a 1440p 144hz monitor, so the extra power would be most welcome.
I'm actually half-considering the RX 480, but I'll wait until I see benchmarks and/or whether NVIDIA has something interesting up their sleeves in regards to a GTX 1060.
RX 480's FLOPS is extremely close to a 980 Ti's, which would make it a pretty significant step up from a 780 Ti… especially at only $200. A single RX 480 won't utterly trounce a 780 Ti SLI setup, but the additional GB of VRAM and the fact that some games don't scale well with multi-GPU setups means that it should compare favorably. And down the line, adding in an additional one for near-GTX 1080 performance is always an option.I do need to get a new graphics card, my current one is kaput and I'm wanting to buy something that could be VR ready in the near future. I was planning on trying out Nvidia for once, but then AMD comes out with this and reminds me that they can do basically as well as Nvidia but for much cheaper.
Also I don't understand the new number conventions of the current graphics cards, it has been a while since I've shopped for one.I'm honestly only sticking with nVidia because I have CS5.5, which only does GPU acceleration on nVidia cards. If you don't have that restriction, and you're on Windows, AMD is good to look at.
On Linux, I find AMD's drivers are absolute crap. nVidia's have worked much better for me.This card just became a lot more interesting to me, since nVidia just set up a requirement for registration with them to get any drivers other than quarterly bug fix ones (Including things like support for new GPUs such as the 1080 and 1070 only in their registration-only drivers until the next quarter). This sufficiently annoys me that I'd look at upgrading CS5.5/Replacing it with something else that supports AMD cards better and getting one of these, 'cause registration-only drivers are ridiculous.
Though I'd still go with nvidia on Linux. Because AMD's linux driver team is absolutely awful.