Computex 2016 | AMD unveils "VR Ready" Radeon RX 480 GPU for $200 USD

Nvidia rocked the gaming world not by announcing the expected GTX 1970 and 1080 graphics cards, but by announcing significantly lower launch prices than what most were expecting. Players are suddenly now within reach of Titan X level performance for under $400 USD.

The ball is now in AMD's court and the company has finally announced its new mainstream competitor: The Radeon RX 480 sporting the Polaris architecture for a very competitive price of $200 USD. Features include a 256-bit memory bus, 4 to 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM, and 36 CU (Compute Units) for over 5 TFLOPS of performance power. In comparison, the GTX 1070 offers just over 6 TFLOPS for almost twice the price while the 1080 offers 9 TFLOPS for three times the price. Thus, a system with two Radeon RX 480 GPUs would provide more raw power than a single GTX 1080 for $200 less.

Other than its hardware details, the RX 480 will be manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process with a relatively low 150 W power demand. This should make the GPU a better fit for notebooks and possibly even for small form factors the size of the Playstation 4. The card will have native support for HDMI 2.0a, DisplayPort 1.4, hardware-accelerated H.265 (de)coder, and FreeSync. Its "VR Ready" capabilities have the potential to bring affordable VR to the masses.

The Radeon RX 480 launches this June 29 with aftermarket designs to follow shortly.

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