AMD Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 Specifications Debut – $200 Pricing Mess

AMD has released the official specifications and launch dates for the upcoming Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 series graphics cards! The AMD Radeon RX 470 launches first on August 4th at 9 a.m. ET and that will be followed up by the AMD Radeon RX 460 on August 8th at 9 a.m. ET. The AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB graphics card starts at $199, so the starting price on these to mainstream desktop gaming graphics cards is going to be below that.

The AMD Radeon RX 470 and 460 use 4th Gen GCN Architecture found on Polaris GPUs and have many of the same key technologies offered on the already available Radeon RX 480. For example you have support for AMD FreeSync, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3 HBR / 1.4 HDR, DirectX 12, Vulkan and more.

The AMD Radeon RX 470 uses the same Polaris 10 GPU that is used on the Radeon RX 480 with parts of it being disabled. For example four Compute Units (CUs) have been disabled resulting in 2048 Stream Processors rather than 2304. The Radeon RX 470 also features lower clock speeds as gone are the 1266MHz boost and 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory speeds of the Radeon RX 480. The Radeon RX 470 boosts up to 1206MHz and uses much slower 6.6 Gbps memory. This means the maximum compute performance has been reduced from 5.8 TFLOPs compared to the 4.9 TFLOPs. The good news is that the AMD Radeon RX 470 is only a 120 Watt TDP graphics card, so power from the single 6-pin PCIe power connector shouldn’t be of concern.

AMD says that the Radeon RX 470 will offer ‘brilliant’ 1920 x 1080 gaming experiences on a wide variety of titles with respectable frame rates with Anti-Aliasing enabled.

Next up we have the AMD Radeon RX 460 and this graphics card is interesting as it is the first to use the Polaris 11 GPU, the cards PCB is small and it should be very affordable. With 896 stream processors clocked at 1090MHz base and 1200MHz boost,56 texture units and 16 ROPs. With these specs you are looking at half ROPS and less than half of the shaders of an Radeon RX 480. Ar 2.2 TFLOPs of compute performance this card isn’t going to be a beast, but it has a TDP of under 75W and that means we might see some cards that don’t need any external power connector! This card could be priced in the $119 price range since it’s basically half a Radeon RX 480 that comes at $199. We heard that the AMD Radeon RX 460 will be offered with 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory, so it’s possible that they could hit some really low price points with this card and we’ve heard rumors that some board partners are looking to release single slot versions.

The AMD Radeon RX 460 is aimed at entry-level gaming market: those that who want titles popular eSports titles like Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, Rocket League and GTAV with high image quality settings on a 1080P display. This card will be very popular if it can pull off decent 1080p performance at a sub $120 price point! The AMD Radeon RX 460 would also be appealing to the HTPC crowd as a ~$100 graphics card with HDMI 2.0b would be great to connect to a 4K UHD TV for general use.

We looked online and found the Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 460 4GB for $149.99 shipped on Amazon (not a 3rd party), so it looks like the Radeon RX 460 2GB would more than likely be priced at $119.99. That pricing would put the AMD Radeon RX 470 really close to the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB at $199. Could the AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB be priced at $179 and then the AMD Radeon RX 470 8GB be around $209? Talk about a pricing/performance mess at the $200 price point! We’ve also heard rumors that the AMD Radeon RX 470 is a good overclocker as it has less shaders.

We’ve already found that the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB basically has the same performance as the 8GB model for 1080P and 1440P gaming, so could the AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB be the card to get this summer?

We have some cards inbound right now from our friends over at XFX, so hopefully we’ll have a review up next Thursday on the XFX Radeon RX 470. It’s looking like we’ll get the card on Monday, so it will be a mad rush to get the review done in just a few days!