Gadgetory

and he's being very cautious with their hand for the RX 480 we previously just recently talked about the release of the card being on jun 29th the announcement was this week at computex 2016 they're being pretty cautious about their market positioning for polaris ten which we're going to talk about here before that all this coverage is brought to you by roseville and a new Cullinan case with tempered glass side panels so the RX 480 that is the first as far as rumors have indicated plus official announcements the first Polaris 10 GPU to be announced it will be more than five teraflops in compute performance the reference card is still going with the blower fan but it's got a small PCB as you can observe in our photos of the card and of am diese live unveil of the card so they're sticking with a sort of semi smaller form factor it's priced at two hundred dollars which means that it will be replacing the 380 x which operated at about 3.97 teraflops compute depending on which 380 x you got so it will be replacing the 380 x the 4 gigabyte capacity for 80 that's two hundred dollars to eight gigabyte one we're not sure yet but probably and this is my speculation here not official probably in the two fifty dollar range AMD doesn't have a lot of room to go higher than that because they threatened by the 1070 once you start entering that mid-range high range market and they really can't go lower than it just because of cost so this is where things get interesting and where AMD kind of is in a tight spot and one thing here Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 neither is meant for the high-end they're not meant to compete with the GTX 1080 they're not really meant to compete with the GTX 1070 though the 480 will certainly try to take market share away from the 1070 at a lower cost at perhaps a slightly lower performance and it should be lower performance because the compute is much different though both companies drive a different amount of actual performance out of their compute and the shader array and everything like that so these Polaris devices are not meant to fight at the high end AMD is not going for a halo entry here they're going for a consumer entry they're targeting the 80-plus percent of consumers who buy one hundreds of $300 video cards and that I think is a good move for them because the 1080 is good and even if Andy could compete with it directly today it seems given their market position a good idea to allow the 1080 some room to breathe and compete where there's no competition right now and that would be the 100 to 300 dollar market because after that point and videos got brand new releases so then the 1060 becomes a concern but we'll come back to that in a moment as far as the RX 480 its positioning as a 4 gigabyte card at two hundred dollars seems okay two hundred fifty dollars at eight gigabytes seems okay once you get beyond that point it's too close to the 1070 I think and people start looking at it as I can spend fifty sixty seventy dollars more and get a pretty good 1070 and that's really not a ton of money at that point depending on who you ask so why is that relevant if they're going to ship in the 250 out of range well there's not a lot of room above the reference design for high-end aib cards so I would not expect a lot of serious overclocking potential or at least even if there's it may be there is overclocking potential let's say there is I would not expect a lot of serious overclocking targeted cards from a I be partners that have greater phase setups better power design that have more advanced PWM or whatever the case may be so there's not a lot of room there to grow after that point because of the threat so once you get below the two hundred dollar price range it opens up even more for AMD because the current competition from Nvidia at the very lowest end would be the 750 Ti that's pretty dated now that was Maxwell version one that was before Maxwell version 2 it certainly isn't Pascal so that card is kind of edging off our charts as we test these new games it's no longer hitting the performance metrics desired even at lower graphics settings so that I would say it's falling off the charts there's room there for AMD to enter the market after this heaven for the TI there's the 950 which when we reviewed it said was a very weird price in position but now it makes sense because the 750 ti is being phased out in the 950 has sort of taken its place from DVR 73 70 and the r9 380 non x will be edged out by the 480 both of them and probably if there is one the RX 470 but we don't have any official confirmation on something like that just yet other than the rumors we've seen around the web so that's the market stack up that's the position right now in terms of performance just to give you an idea and these are not linearly comparable but I want to throw out some numbers here the gtx 960 4 gigabyte card is priced at about 180 dollars it has about two and a half to three teraflops of compute performance that puts it a good deal below the 480 and raw compute but that's not counting architectural things algorithms things like that but raw compute is a good metric to at least base our initial assumptions on since we don't have a real r x 480 so the 960 i think we'll sort of get edged out a bit by the 480 and the 380 x certainly will be replaced by it then there's the 979 70 performs more comparable to the higher range cards it will be of course replaced by the 1070 but the reason I mention it is because of all the used models that will be hitting the market and because of all the sales on the new models that are being dumped very briefly by the retailers before the usual video card price spike at eol because they're trying to get those people who thought they were going to buy two cars or sli or whatever at the end of life and gouge the extra couple bucks that the retailer's can at the end of that so overall MD is being cautious with its hand it is not playing to the high end halo market right now they don't want that small percentage of users they do but not not for the fight that would be required put up against nvidia at this time going for the mid-range at the mid-range nvidia will have the 1060 but it's not here yet so here's the thing to look out for AMD announced the release date as jun 29th i don't know if that's a yield thing i don't know if it's a manufacturing thing if this was a business decision it seems an odd one and that's because at that point the 1070 will have saturated the part of the market that it is targeting for the immediate adopters of course there's a huge amount of market left this is obviously very small portion but they do lose that bit of the halo effect for the immediate launch of the 1070 in the 480 at the lower end we look at things like the 1060 I don't know when that's coming out but certainly the 29th is going to be getting a little bit closer than I think AMD might have intended to be originally with Nvidia's mid-range performer in terms of the long-term prospects Vega will be shipping with hbm to in theory at some point I don't know that HB m2 is really what AM d needs to get the edge that they did that they want with these high-end cards like the 490 or whatever it may be maybe it's the 480 X I don't know the name of it none of us really do but they need more than hbm to they need a higher compute they certainly AMD has a good handle on a sink right now with the physical Hardware on the die and videos taken the algorithm approach to async compute so they're in a good position there dx11 still huge md is dx11 performance is so low that the gains to DX 12 although large are still putting them in some ways below or at parity with nvidia so is it's it's a very big fight for them to take the 480 is a good place to start in the 200 250 dollar markets I think after that point and they will need to look into the even lower market so that'd be a hundred to two hundred dollars so that they can try and edged out the remaining and video low-end chips before the Pascal chips come so a very sort of haphazard quick chaotically organized thoughts on the new AMD launch and the competition against Pascal this is obviously we're still in Taipei here we haven't had a good chance to really dig in deep with the technical details but we'll be doing that as launch approaches so do stay tuned for more information on that so as always thanks for watching a patriotic virtual video if you have thoughts on this because none of us really have a super hard data just yet leave a comment below start a discussion hopefully a civil one and talk about what your thoughts are and Andy's market strategy here thanks ROG and I'll see you all next time