AMD’s showing at Computex 2016 was very interesting, to say the least. The hotly anticipated Polaris architecture—Team Red’s response to Nvidia’s next-gen Pascal line—made its debut with the RX 480, a $199 part that promises better performance than a GTX 970 at a substantially lower price-point. While Nvidia’s GTX 1070, set to release on June 10th, is certainly a great proposition for 4K gaming, statistically, 1080p remains the most popular resolution to game at.
Circa-970 levels of performance means that the RX 480 will be able to push 1080p/60 at Ultra settings in modern titles, an unheard of level of performance in the $200 price-bracket. Interestingly, the RX 480 makes use of the Polaris 10 GPU which will supposedly be featured in the PS4 Neo. AMD also briefly demoed its next-gen “Summit Ridge” processor, on the next-gen Zen architecture. Zen is set to feature a 40 percent leap in IPC (instructions per clock) over Piledriver, meaning that Zen-based CPUs may become a viable alternative to an Intel i5 or i7 for gaming, especially if the price is right.
Also showcased was a complete refresh of AMD’s A-series APU line. AMD’s value-oriented 7th gen A-series APUs pair entry-level Excavator cores with an on-chip Radeon graphics component.
