Another day, another murky report about next-gen graphics cards, eh? Today’s is the result of a rumoured behind-closed-doors session held in Taiwan, in which journalists were shown a sneak peek of what AMD have in store with their upcoming Polaris 10 GPU. The bottom line from that event, if the sources who attended the event which might have taken place are telling the truth, is that Polaris 10 offers GTX 980 ti levels of performance at a $300 price point.
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It’s not concrete information, is what I’m trying to say. As with the multitude of other rumours and reports emerging from around the globe about both AMD and NVIDIA’s upcoming graphics hardware, it’s best to take a slightly cynical standpoint and view all the information hollistically.
To that end, AMD’s recent quarterly financial does stand to corroborate this latest report from Taiwan. They reported that the new 14nm FinFET manufacturing process used in the creation of Polaris GPUs leads to greater efficiency and transistor density, which eventually and fundamentally leads to higher performance.
What this new report is saying is that the Polaris 10 GPU will offer that higher performance, of a level roughly equivalent to NVIDIA’s current-gen, $550+ GTX 980 ti, at the $300 price point. How does it arrive there? Well, assuming the Polaris 10 is the successor to 300-series cards currently available (as AMD themselves have implied), and the pricing for that next-gen successor remains the same, you arrive at a card with 980 ti levels of performance for the price of a 390X.
I’m not entirely convinced, personally. There are too many unknowns and variables to extract anything definitive out of this report alone, but as ever it builds up a broader picture, in tandem with other rumours, that offers some insight into Polaris’ capabilities.