It’s official. Putting all speculations to rest, AMD has announced Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 specifications. At the E3 2016 PC Gaming Show, AMD had briefly teased the next two cards in the lineup – RX 470 and RX 460. Based on the Polaris architecture used in RX 480, the RX 470 and RX 460 are cheaper and offer a low power option.
RX 470
This card is based on a salvaged version of Polaris 10 GPU. It clocks lower compared to other cards to provide lower power consumption. The GPU configuration ships with 32 CUs enabled (2048 SPs), which is 4 fewer than RX 480. The RX 470 will clock at 926MHz for the core clock. The boost clock will run faster, at 1206MHz. The lower than RX 480 clocking speed makes sense because RX 470 stands at 120W TBP. This is 30W lower than RX 480.
The RX 470’s shader/texture/compute performance is at about 85% of RX 480 and geometry/ROP throughput at 95% of RX 480. RX 470 comes with added benefit of higher clock speeds, twice the number of stream processors, and architectural enhancements and new features that went into Polaris, relative to R7 270/230. We expect AMD to target RX 470 at the same general 1080p market as the 4GB RX 480. But it’s worth noting that RX 470 offers somewhat lower performance in exchange for a lower price and lower power consumption.
RX 460
It is the lowest power member of theRadeon 400 family. This is also the smaller of the two Polaris GPUs and is touted as a low-power desktop star. RX 460 will ship with 14 CUs enabled. With 896 stream processors enabled, the base fclock of RX 460 will clock slightly aggressive (1090MHz) compared to RX 470 (925MHz) while the boost clock is the same at 1200MHz. The RX 460 comes equipped with two options for memory – 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 clocked at 7Gbps. When it comes to power consumption, this card stands apart. Rated at sub-75W, this will cater to an important market segment for GPU vendors.
It is touted as the best bet for AMD in the low power segment, considering what happened to AMD when NVIDIA introduced the Maxwell architecture. The RX 460 is not as aggressive about performance as other Polaris cards. This is expected because of the sub-75W spec. AMD expects RX 460 to be a strong contender in the low power market and views it as a suitable upgrade for gamers who are in the process of upgrading from iGPUs.
We present below the comparison of Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 card specs –
| AMD Radeon RX 470 | AMD Radeon RX 460 | |
| Stream Processors | 2048 | 896 |
| Texture Units | 128 | 56 |
| ROPs | 32 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 926MHz | 1090MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1206MHz | 1200MHz |
| Memory Clock | 6.6Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 128-bit |
| VRAM | 4GB | 2GB/4GB |
| FP64 | 16-Jan | 16-Jan |
| Transistor Count | 5.7B | Not known |
| Typical Board Power | 120W | <75W |
| Manufacturing Process | GloFo 14nm | GloFo 14nm |
| Architecture | GCN 4 | GCN 4 |
| GPU | Polaris 10 | Polaris 11 |
| Launch Date | 8/4/2016 | 8/8/2016 |
| Launch Price | TBA | TBA |
Pricing and Availability
The Radeon RX 470 is expected to launch on August 4th while the RX 460 will launch 4 days later, on August 8th. Though the prices are not announced, we expect pricing to be less than $150 for RX 470 and less than $120 for RX 460. AMD’s strategic advantage lies in the sub-$250 market since NVIDIA’s lowest end card is priced at $250.
If you happen to be one of the first ones to buy either the RX 470 or the RX 460, do let us know the gaming performance you experience. Feel free to post in the comments section. If you are not aware, NVIDIA is planning on releasing a mobile variant of the Quadro P600 and P5000.