The PS4 and Xbox One may only just now be finding their footing, but they are already old news- at least, as far as actual graphical technology goes. AMD and Nvidia are both embracing the 14nm fabrication process for their chips starting next year- and we are getting some major graphical advancements as a result.
AMD’s bid for supremacy in this war is their Polaris architecture, which the company announced today. Polaris offers a major leap in power and efficiency- comparing an unannounced GPU product against the Nvidia’s GTX 950 running Star Wars Battlefront at medium settings at 1080p60, AMD says that Polaris offers a 61 per cent reduction in power consumption, requiring 84W vs Nvidia’s 140W.
These are the kinds of benefits that we can expect as end users, as a result of the move to the 14nm fabrication process- GPUs will now be smaller, and more power efficient. An implication of that, in turn is, that within a similar size mould, more power can now be packed in.
Polaris includes a primitive discard accelerator, hardware scheduler, instruction pre-fetch, improved shader efficiency and better memory compression. It also includes support for HDMI 2a, as well as DisplayPort 1.3 compatibility.
Polaris chips will be launching later this year – AMD currently has them down for Q2 2016, so we should see them between April and June of this year. We should be hearing more about the chips at the ongoing CES. Stay tuned to GamingBolt and we’ll keep you posted.
We got some preliminary information on Polaris early- we’ve posted the slides they were sent below. You can check them out for yourself.
