There’s a lot of constant rumors on the internet about the launch of the next generation graphics cards from AMD. While everything indicates that the company will launch part of their new generation cards in October, AMD confirmed in a shareholders meeting that AMD GPUs for enthusiasts (Vega 10) will arrive during the first half of 2017.
At first we knew that AMD was going to push the launch of some Vega GPUs to October of this year, and actually everything indicates that the first ones will be presented on October 21st, the same day Battlefield 1 launches. Nevertheless, it is also well known that, as it happened with Polaris, AMD will divide future GPUs into two groups: Vega 10 and Vega 11.
Today is the day. AMD has officially presented the RX 470 and RX 460; two graphics solutions that are meant to cover one of the mid-range and mid-lower-range segments and are marketed to those players who have a budget of approximately 100-200 dollars.
In the end, almost all of the leaks and rumors that we have been seeing have been confirmed, which has certainly surprised us, but we want to make use of all of the official information that AMD has given us to create a special article with which we hope to ease all of your doubts.
Like always, you can leave any question that you may have in the comments, and I will answer them without any problem.
Radeon RX 470, mid-range with high-range aspirations
The RX 470 has proved itself to be a graphics solution that’s very similar in specs to the RX 480. As we can see in the photo, it has 2,048 shaders, keeps the 256-bit bus and has 128 texture units and 32 raster units. This means that its performance should be slightly inferior to that of the RX 480 4GB GDDR5, but we can’t tell the exact difference.
Everyone knows that one of the biggest projects that Microsoft is working is the new API DX12, which is the new possibility of blending graphics cards regardless which company has built their graphic core, something that will leave obsolete in an immediate matter the actual SLI and CrossFire of Nvidia and AMD. Now Microsoft has …
You may have already realized that with the new generation of graphic cards, AMD has change their nomenclature once again, generating doubts and controversy among the users and even the experts as always. Therefore, the manufacturer has come to the rescue to explain the details of this new nomenclature that will be used from now on.
The new nomenclature that AMD is using in this generation of graphic cards is, as always, indicative if it’s known how to interpret. Coming up next we are going to explain it in the simplest way possible to leave no room for any doubts. In the explanation, we are going to take off from the next slide.
The GTX 1080 Phoenix of Gainward are three new graphic cards bases in the GPU Pascal of the GTX 1080 that NVIDIA has placed in the market a few days ago. The most basic model (Gainward GTX 1080 Phoenix) will work at 1.607 MHz of base frecuency and at 1.733 MHz with Boost, while the …
According to the latest rumors, the hypothetical new version of the Sony PS4 (dubbed PS4K or PS4.5) is more than hypothetical, to the point that some have even claim to know what will integrate new hardware. What is ringing trueue in recent days is that Sony could use an AMD Polaris GPU, namely a Polaris 10 with 2,304 stream processors.
The PlayStation 4K is known internally as “NEO” within Sony (or so they say, because we should remember that there is no confirmation from the brand), and leaving aside the controversy of whether or not a hardware upgrade of the current PS4 is necessary, or whether it would be better to launch a completely new console, certainly a performance boost to the Sony console would suit it well. And how is this achieved? Logically with more powerful hardware and better optimization of the games.
I remember perfectly that it was 3DFX which marked the starting point of the multi-GPU configurations, with the release of the Voodoo 2 in the general consumer market, as graphical solution that can be considered the origin of what would later become SLI and CrossFire, made by NVIDIA and AMD respectively.
Originally SLI (Scan Line Interleave) mode of the Voodoo 2 acted in a simple way: two cards running in parallel resorting to a division of the processing load simply but effectively, dividing the screen in two and distributing the lines 50-50.
As is the case with the current solutions at that time, this meant doubling the power of rendering, but the texture memory is not added for a very simple reason which is that each graphics card needs to double the scene data it’s working on.
This is a very important limitation that we currently still have, just like the level of support on the software side and many others that we’ll review in this special, where we will give a series of basic guidelines that will allow you to better understand how SLI and CrossFire modes work and assess whether or not they are really worth it.
A preview
Before we jump in, we will explain a little better what these technologies are and how they work, as that will provide us the necessary foundation on which we can have a better understanding of everything that we will explain below. Please note that this article is intended to be useful even for the most amateurish, so it is likely that you find plenty of information you may already know.
If we have to change a component of our PC it is wise to at least go and check whether the piece we’re going to assemble is better than what we already have.
The most important part for daily use is definitely the CPU, but if instead we use the PC to play videogames we can’t leave the video card out. In addition, you can also bet on a next generation hard drive, or an SSD, so as to have a really fast computer. There are 3 places that work for our specific case and allows us to quickly compare the various models and brands of processors (CPU), of video cards (GPU) and solid state drives (SSD).
1. CPUBoss: thanks to this tool it is possible to compare with each other the different models of processors on the market, so you can choose the best or that which best suits our case. The research helps us by giving us the complete names of the models and once the comparison is made you can very simply see which is better of the two. In addition to the general assessment there’s much more information, such as the release date, price, speed, cores, and specially you can make your own and true comparison between two models by seeing the differences in a handy chart.
Although many users still use lower resolutions, we can say that playing in 1080p has become the new standard or, to put it in other way, the main goal of most of the PC gaming community.
One of the main reasons lies in the good quality-value relation that implies mounting a computer that allows you to enjoy these resolutions with acceptable performance, in addition to the large drop in prices that high quality monitors have experienced, coming in large sizes and Full HD resolutions.
