From PC World: The next-generation graphics card war is officially on—though it’s already shaping up very differently than previous versions. While Nvidia kicked things off with the overwhelming firepower of the enthusiast-only $600 GeForce GTX 1080 and $380 GTX 1070, AMD’s attacking the mainstream instead.
In a livestream from Computex in Taipei, AMD announced that the Radeon RX 480 will be the first graphics card based on its forthcoming Polaris graphics processors. And get this: The Radeon RX 480 stands ready to deliver performance equivalent to what today’s $500 graphics cards offer, as first reported in the Wall Street Journal earlier today. That’s roughly in line with the Radeon R9 390X, GeForce GTX 980, or air-cooled Radeon Fury.
But here’s the real bombshell: The Radeon RX 480 will cost only $200 when it goes on sale on June 29.
Assuming that AMD’s performance claims prove accurate in real-world gaming scenarios, the massive performance leap stems from the adoption of 14nm FinFET technology in Polaris, a leap forward by two full technological generations for graphics processors. Both AMD and Nvidia (which uses 16nm FinFET tech in its new Pascal GPUs) had languished at 28nm since late 2011, after 20nm technology proved to be a bust for graphics cards.
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