"I think I can count on one hand the number of assets in the game which are intentionally non-destructible for gameplay reasons. And to be quite honest, I’m a little disappointed in ourselves for not coming up with a way for those to be destructible too."

From Ace Combat and Red Faction to Syndicate Wars and Halo, there’s supposedly a large number of games that have inspired Polaris. That is, of course, a vast range of games, many of which are very different from each other. As a developer, how do you decide what elements to take, and how challenging is it to ensure that all of them together form a cohesive and well balanced experience?

That’s a great question. On some level, the breadth of influences represents how long this idea has been gestating. I grew up immersed in the works of Bullfrog and Psygnosis, particularly science fiction titles like Syndicate and G-Police. I’ve always had an interest in games which blend real-time combat with strategy and tactics, with a layer of science fiction roleplay and power fantasy on top. And even amongst the specific titles you’ve cited here, hopefully there are some common threads which emerge, for example the arcade flight combat of Ace Combat, the interplay between on foot and in vehicle combat in Halo, the run-and-gun Halo combat experience in the context of simulated real-time destruction in Red Faction: Guerilla. In terms of how we pick and choose from our inspirations, it’ll always be a melting pot of ideas from across the team, then a process of refinement and synthesis whereby we see which ideas can be combined in a complementary way, and then the final proof is by implementing an idea in software and exposing it to playtesting. Even the best idea on paper, taken from the most confident source of inspiration, can fall to pieces when the unique characteristics of your game force you to do things in a slightly different way or as part of a different overall set of mechanics and dynamics.

Polaris’ art style is one of its more eye catching elements. How did you land on this look for the game?

This was actually surprisingly difficult. When we first announced the game, we were pursuing a photorealistic style, as this was a good fit for the talents on the team (we’ve got art talent from Cloud Imperium, Rebellion, and Warhorse Studios on the team, so you can understand we’d naturally lean more realistic). Furthermore, we’ve been working on a parallel project alongside Polaris which is high fidelity photorealistic, so one game naturally flowed into the other. But it actually took quite a bit of work to balance the various interconnected destruction systems, particularly the terrain destruction and the architectural destruction, with a style for the characters, vehicles, and lighting which felt intentional, cohesive, and provided the right kind of gameplay communication and feedback. And that led us to the style we have today. Something else that’s important for us is that folks aren’t comparing Polaris to mega budget AAA giants like Fortnite and Valorant. We’re a team of 11. We’re tiny. We can do something tightly focused and specific and offer our own experience which is distinct from anything else you’ll get in other games. But we do not have the resources or production budgets of Epic or Riot. And if we’re inviting comparisons between Polaris and those games, we’re not just failing ourselves, but we’re failing our audience too. I think we’ve managed to settle on a style which is clearly indie, but also beautiful and easy to read, whilst also conveying our science fiction roleplay fantasy.

How comprehensive are the destructibility mechanics in Polaris? How significantly can players’ surroundings be impacted by their actions, and in turn, what sort of an impact does that have on the moment-to-moment action?

They are as comprehensive as can be. Red Faction: Guerilla is perhaps the best point of comparison. We have fully destructible voxelised terrain which you can dig through, carve up, leave craters in, deform as you see fit. All of our architectural structures are fully destructible. All foliage is destructible. All roads and set decoration is destructible. And on top of that we have destructible vehicles, mission-critical assets, set piece assets, and so on. I think I can count on one hand the number of assets in the game which are intentionally non-destructible for gameplay reasons. And to be quite honest, I’m a little disappointed in ourselves for not coming up with a way for those to be destructible too. Maybe we will do yet and then we can hand on heart say that the game really is 100% destructible, top to bottom.

"The best experiences will be had amongst groups of friends, but we’re making sure not to block solo play, and to provide a range of difficulty modes so solo play is accessible to players of a range of skill levels."

Polaris is billed as a PvE extraction game, but does the game also feature any PvP or solo modes?

It’s fully a PvE experience, although it can be played solo or in teams of up to 4 players. The best experiences will be had amongst groups of friends, but we’re making sure not to block solo play, and to provide a range of difficulty modes so solo play is accessible to players of a range of skill levels. No interest in PvP though. That’s a wholly different kind of game experience, requiring a different set of game design, engineering, and infrastructure challenges to overcome. Something for Polaris 2 perhaps.

What should players expect from the game’s maps, how diverse they will be, and the way they are designed?

We’ve got 4 maps up and running so far. And at least that many at prototype stage. We started off focusing on islands and archipelagos (Silent Cartographer is never far from my thoughts). But we’ve started to break that mould a bit. We have a level set in desert canyons for example. Another which has Avatar-style floating mountains. And with architectural destruction such a core feature of the game, I’m excited for us to explore huge megacities and vast built up metropolises. It’s super quick for us to put maps together and our level creation pipeline is really versatile and easy to iterate on. We’re going to run out of time long before we run out of ideas. With the destruction gameplay, the blend of on foot and in vehicle traversal, and the science fiction setting, there’s just endless possibilities for creative level design.

What sort of variety will the game offer in the weapons and vehicles players will be able to use for their purposes?

At launch, we’re focusing on ranged weapons and air vehicles. But the potential is there for as varied a combat action experience as games like Battlefront, Battlefield, Death Stranding or Halo. In principle there’s nothing preventing us considering ground vehicles, tanks, mechs, anti-gravity bikes, multi-person vehicles, and more. And on the weapon front, although right now we’re focused on ranged projectile weapons, I’d love for us to explore melee weapons, beam weapons, castable abilities, and other offensive, defensive, and support abilities beyond just guns and launchers. It’s all up for grabs. We’re just constrained by the size of team and our available time and resources. I want us to deliver something focused and specific rather than go too broad and spread ourselves too thin.

"The game you buy will be a complete game on day 1 with hours of potential enjoyment available. If the game is a success, then of course we’ll consider supporting it long term. But that’s a decision to consider once our audience has given us permission to do so."

You’ve spoken in the past about how Polaris isn’t intended to be a live service project, which is particularly unusual for a multiplayer shooter these days. Can you talk us through how you decided on this approach for the game, and what prompted you to decide against a games-as-a-service approach?

Firstly, I can’t stress enough that this isn’t me expressing any kind of prejudice against live service or long tail game experiences. This includes early access too. These are games I’ve voraciously enjoyed in the past. I adore Destiny and No Man’s Sky. And at the indie scale, I’m fanatical about games like Risk of Rain, Noita, Caveblazers, Subnautica, V Rising, and more. So I love enjoying games in this way, where the game you buy one month can have transformed into something quite different six months later. But that is a big commitment to make to your audience. If you’re selling your game as a live service, whether that’s a AAA experience like Diablo or an indie game like Lethal Company, you have an obligation to make good on that commitment. Part of what people are paying for is your assurance that you’ll support the game for the long term. It’s almost like selling a soft subscription. And unless you are absolutely, categorically confident you can deliver on that, it’s safer to avoid disappointing folks. There’s so much competition out there right now, why risk overselling and under delivering.

With Polaris, I want to offer players something specific. Pay this amount and get a fixed set of things for your money. The game you buy will be a complete game on day 1 with hours of potential enjoyment available. If the game is a success, then of course we’ll consider supporting it long term. But that’s a decision to consider once our audience has given us permission to do so. It’d be hubris for us to assume that Polaris is worthy of long term support before our players have told us it is. For now, we’re going to focus on making it the best game it can be at launch – something folks feel good about buying and keeping as a finished game.

Do you have any plans to eventually also bring Polaris to consoles?

I’d love to. The limiting factor is cost. If you look at Variable State’s output historically, we’ve always been a PC and console developer. Traditionally we’ve simultaneously shipped across all platforms, but given Polaris is our first self-published title, we’ve had to tread a bit more cautiously with this one. Once we have an absolutely impeccable and airtight PC experience locked down, and assuming we can find the right partner to support us on the business side, then that’s the right time to broaden the player base by porting out to other platforms.

No, what’s special about the RX 480 is that it builds on technological progress–the shift to the 14nm process primarily–to offer unprecedented levels of graphics performance at the $200 pricepoint. Polaris’ key selling point is straightforward: It offers more for less. With the move to 14nm, AMD can squeeze more transistors into substantially less space. The direct consequence can be seen in Polaris 10’s diminutive die size: At a mere 220 mm2, it’s half the size of Hawaii/Grenada at 438mm2. The 290X was the high watermark for a very different AMD from the AMD of today: A company that fought Nvidia tooth and nail to somehow deliver better price/performance in every bracket. But the limited R&D budget and the several years of running under loss have taken their toll. AMD today doesn’t have the luxury to bring the fastest, sexiest product to the market. Instead, they’ve opted pragmatically to make an impact in the mainstream segment, to deliver high-end graphics horsepower to everyday gamers.

In many ways, the 480 is the inverse of the Hawaii-based 290X. The 480 positively sips power while it was an open secret that the 290X’s monstrous power requirements were understated so that AMD could sell it as a 250W part. The 480 runs cool and quiet while the 290X touched 95 degrees Celsius during normal operation and sounded like a jet turbine. And in terms of positioning, where the 290X was 2013’s $549 performance king, the RX 480’s $200 price tag puts it very comfortably in midrange territory. It’s a cooler, quieter, lower profile evolution at a much more budget-friendly price-point: what’s not to like? But the discrete graphics market a very different place today than it was in 2013. Where does the RX 480 fit in right now? And crucially, how relevant is it?

Nvidia was the first to out products on the new process node, with the GTX 1080 and 1070 debuting in late May and early June respectively. But Nvidia’s strategy with their Pascal line is fundamentally different from what Team Red’s looking to do with Polaris. Founder’s Edition pricing has effectively meant that both the x70 and x80 lines have received an $80-150 markup in pricing, compared to their Maxwell predecessors. We’re still waiting for a $379 GTX 1070. We don’t expect it to materialize anytime soon.

With the new Titan X, Nvidia’s pushed the pricing boat even further out there, with a very straightforward $200 markup compared to the original Titan X. Between circa $800 GTX 1080 SKUs and this, we can only imagine what 1080 Ti pricings will looks a few months down the road. At $249, the GTX 1060 is far more price-competitive, particularly against the 8 GB variant of the 480, but there’s nothing quite like the $200 4 GB RX 480 in Nvidia’s current product stack. Of course, this is a great time to snap up used GTX 970’s off ebay for even less, but that’s a whole other thing altogether. AMD’s objective with the RX 480 was to increase their TAM (total addressable market.)

While 4K gaming occupies a lot of mindshare, according to Steam, 1080p is still where it’s at for the vast majority of PC gamers, and that’s unlikely to change for the next 3-5 years. Because most PC gamers are, in a sense, bottlenecked by their monitor resolution, the need is for a competitive card that delivers at 1080p/60, and the RX 480 does just that. Moreover, while we’re still a bit cagey about VR’s immediate prospects, the 480 is enough to power a great HTC Vive/Oculus Rift experience. But is the 480 the card you want? Without further ado, let’s get on with the review.

Initial Impressions:

The folks over at AMD sent us a reference 8 GB RX 480 to test.  The official pricing for the card is $229, but 0n account of availability issues, actual prices for the 8 GB variant start at $239, dangerously close to GTX 1060 prices. Our review unit didn’t ship with the retail box, but it sure was packed with a lot of awesome bubblewrap. Yay bubblewrap! Moving on to the card itself, our 480 was wonderfully utilitarian–no glowing red lights or pointy bits at all. The textured matte black finish lent the card a premium feel in hand.

Thermals, Noise, and PowerTune:

The single blower fan, wasn’t exactly whisper-quiet, but the default thermal/acoustic profile tended to prefer lower RPM, quieter fan operation over thermals: While the fan operated in the very tolerable vicinity of 2000 RPM, temps climbed worryingly, peaking at 91 degrees. On the plus side, the new Wattman software that comes bundled with the driver offers a good deal of granular control over fan speed, temps, and voltages and clockspeed. A slightly more aggressive custom fan profile, with the speed upped a notch to around 2400 RPM is enough to keep the card’s temps in the mid 80s, while still remaining relatively quiet.

AMD PowerTune is analogous to Nvidia’s GPU boost, regulating clockspeeds to ensure the card stays within predefined temperature and power limits. While the RX 480 has a nominal boost clock of 1266 MHz, we found that, in practice, the card’s core clockspeed tended to fluctuate around 1218 MHz. Fortunately, simply upping the power limit by 15 percent was all it took to get the card running consistently at 1266 MHz, clawing back a decent bit of performance. We benched the card at stock power draw, of course, but we highly recommend feeding the card a bit more power in real-world scenarios.

Benchmarking Methodology:

We ran all benchmarks on the RX 480 and compared these results with collated data for the R9 390X DCUIII OC.  We ran all titles at 1080p, the most commonly used resolution by PC gamers per Steam. Where available, MSAA was turned up to 4X, and all other settings were maxed out.

In each game, except for GTA V which provides an intensive built-in benchmark, we picked a specific area in the environment that appeared to be a close match to typical gameplay conditions. For example in The Witcher 3, this location was White Orchard, the starting village.

We ran our RX 480 benches on a testbed running the latest build of Windows 10, on the latest official drivers. The R9 390X data is exactly a year old. This offers an interesting opportunity: Since the Crimson Driver rebrand last November, AMD’s made a concerted effort to deliver consistent and timely driver updates. The accumulated results a year later are telling: despite having 512 fewer shaders and a 33 percent less memory bandwidth, the RX 480 handed in better results at 1080p across the board, compared to the 390X running on the older 15.2 drivers. Of course, the 390X itself has also benefited from this, but the results do seem to indicate a genuine commitment on AMD’s part to improve the quality of their graphics drivers.

We did multiple benchmarking runs per game, and used FRAPS to record framerates before calculating multi-run averages for each game.

Testbed:

• Core i5 4440 at 3.1 GHz
• Gigabyte H81M-D3H Motherboard
• 8 GB of DDR3 RAM at 1666 MHZ
• 4 TB WD Blue SSHD at 7200 RPM
• Coolermaster Thunder 600W PSU
• A 22-inch 1080p Display
• A huge black cabinet

Benchmarking Results: The Witcher 3

The performance uplift compared to our old 390X data set is immediately evident in The Witcher 3. The RX 480 hands in an eminently playable experience with a 47 FPS average, while the 390X averaged 27 percent slower. Apart from driver improvements over time, cumulated Witcher 3 performance updates are also a likely at work here. But whatever combination of factors, AMD hardware showed a marked increase in The Witcher 3 performance since last year and the whole Hairworks controversy. At 47 FPS on average, the game does a good job conveying a “subjective 60” experience. If you must run the game at a consistent 60 FPS update, Hairworks will have to go and foliage visibility range will have to be dropped a notch. Either way, the RX 480 delivers a fantastic Witcher 3 experience going above and beyond the console versions.

Benchmarking Results: Alien: Isolation

Seemingly defying common knowledge that franchise tie-ins are just cash grabs, Alien: Isolation offers a remarkably tense and well-crafted survival horror experience. The visuals are great–particularly the atmospheric lighting, but even better, performance scales admirably on PC. A cross-gen title like Isolation should have no issues running on a card of the 480’s calibre. Unsurprisingly, the RX 480 hands in a 151 FPS average, ahead of the 390X at 142 FPS. Unless you have a high-framerate monitor, all those extra frames are going to waste. Alien: Isolation makes a great use case for VSR (Virtual Super Resolution) downsampling, as both the RX 480 and the 390X have enough performance headroom to downsample from 1440p or higher while maintaining playable framerates.

Benchmarking Results: Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V is the example of how to execute a multiplat. From a technical perspective, GTA V plays to strengths of every platform it appears on: Aggressive LoD scaling and lower-res textures enable the game to hand in a solid 30 FPS experience on the last-gen consoles. The next-gen console versions aren’t a simple up-resing job: Many assets have been built from scratch, with high-poly meshes and hi-res textures factoring in the plentiful amount of headroom offered by the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. The inclusion of a first-person perspective completely changes the gameplay equation, turning GTA V into a kind of urban Far Cry. The PC version is Rockstar’s crowning achievement: a smorgasbord of adjustable settings allows the game to scale any which way you’d like: Want a PS3/Xbox 360 visual experience at 120 Hz? It’s doable. Want a top-end 4K experience going above and beyond the PS4/Xbox One? Go for it.

The intensive PC exclusive features, particularly the increased LoD, make GTA V’s PC benchmark punishing. GTA V is yet another example of what mature drivers can do for AMD hardware. We noted in our earlier 390X review that the 390X struggled with GTA V’s top-end settings, handing in a somewhat choppy 35 FPS update in GTA V’s benchmark. The RX 480 has the advantage, with a 40 FPS average. The performance uplift here isn’t quite as revelatory—thanks to a substantially wider memory interface, the 390X has far more memory bandwidth available to it, meaning that it takes less of a performance hit when enabling hardware antialiasing. Dropping to FXAA results in the RX 480’s framerate increase to a 46 FPS average. If you’re after a better-than-console 60 FPS experience, disabling the PC-exclusive Advanced Settings should suffice.

Benchmarking Results: Doom

With the new low-level APIs—DirectX 12 and Vulkan—here to stay, we benchmarked Doom to get a picture of how the RX 480 will perform in upcoming games. The RX 480’s async compute capabilities—the ability to run compute and graphics loads at the same time, under Vulkan and DX12—has resulted in a tangible performance uplift over OpenGL. When running under Vulkan, we averaged 109 FPS, while this dipped to 83 FPS under OpenGL. This is a profound 25 percent uptick in performance. An interesting caveat about benchmarking Doom: FRAPs hasn’t been updated yet to work in DX12 and Vulkan titles. Because of this, we made use of Present Mon, a rather unwieldy command-line tool. Nevertheless, it’s the only option to bench Vulkan and DX12 games as of now.

Overclocking

With a conservative 150W TDP and a single six-pin power connector, we expected that inadequate power delivery would hold back the RX 480’s overclocking potential, and unfortunately, this seems to be just the case. AMD’s bundled Wattman software is fantastic, offering granular control over everything—voltages, temperature and acoustic limits, and of course core and memory clockspeeds. Due to the said power delivery limitations, the RX 480 has a lot less overclocking headroom than it ought to. As a result, we were only able to push the core clock up by 6 percent, to 1340 MHz. We were able to bump the memory up to 8.6 GHz. The result of the overclock is tangible in The Witcher 3, with a 4 FPS performance uplift, but we were left wanting more.

Conclusion

With their Polaris line, AMD wants to tap into the mainstream market by banking on the shift to the 14nm  process node to redefine what’s possible for a $200 card. At $229, the 8 GB version of the RX 480 we’ve reviewed here is slightly pricier, but you get 8 GB of VRAM and slightly higher memory bandwidth for your cash. As a single-card option the 8 GB RX 480 is priced dangerously close to the GTX 1060, which enjoys a comfortable performance advantage in DX11 titles. However the lack of SLI in Nvidia’s budget offering makes the 480 enticing for a degree of futureproofing: Buy a single 480 now, and, when the 1080/60 experience becomes compromised, pop in a second one. Although we reviewed the 8 GB variant here, the 4 GB model offers near-identical performance (plus or minus 1-3 FPS). Priced at $200, the 4 GB RX 480 is the real game-changer.

Rating: 8/10

A review unit was provided by AMD.

A little history here: Both AMD and Nvidia had 28nm products out on the market by Q1 2012—the Radeon HD 7970 and the GTX 680 respectively. Prior to this, the nature of the semiconductor industry meant that a die shrink would be hit roughly every eighteen months, meaning at most 2 generations of graphics cards per process node.

At each die shrink, transistor size would decrease, and performance per watt would increase exponentially. The 7800 GTX to the 8800 GTX. The 8800/9800 GTX to the GTX 280. The GTX 280 to the GTX 480/580. Each of these represented a monumental leap in performance per watt. Every 18 months, performance doubled while the power envelope stayed largely the same. And then, in 2012, things changed because the semiconductor foundries started bumping into the laws of physics.

28nm is a mindbogglingly tiny length—to put things in scale, a human hair can be up to 100 micrometers, or 100,000 nanometers in width. The smaller a transistor gets, the more difficult it is to control its gate. At 14/16nm, FinFET transistors are needed for sufficiently fine gate control. At 7nm and beyond, quantum tunneling rears its head, electrons skip any which way they want to, and conventional transistor models simply don’t work. The technology does exist (at least in theory) to make the leap to increasingly smaller process nodes, but unsurprisingly, it’s not cheap.

With economics thrown in the mix, the cost-benefit equation just doesn’t make sense the way it used to: Whether you’re talking IoT-enabled wearables, smartphone SoCs, gaming consoles, or million-dollar HPC research platforms, 28nm is the sweet spot, delivering an adequate level of computing power whether you’re scaling down or up. It’s just about good enough to adequately meet consumer needs across verticals, and of course the longer manufacturers cling to it, the cheaper it gets. And when it came to the graphics market, clinging is precisely what they did.

Nvidia’s GTX 700 series was a mix of outright rebadges (like the GTX 770), and scaled-down and scaled-up variations of existing designs. AMD is even guiltier in this respect: The Pitcairn GPU that showed up in 2012’s HD 7870 was rebadged not once, but twice as the R9 270X and the R7 370. Credit’s due where it’s due: Nvidia made great strides in power efficiency with Maxwell and AMD brought forwards-looking HBM memory to the table early. But bottom-line graphics performance for anything but the top-of-the-line flagships has failed to increase substantially since 2012, discounting rebranding hijinks.

This was the scenario until about a month ago: Inertia in every segment apart from low-volume, high-impact behemoths. Old flagships moved further and further downmarket. Yes, they wrung 28nm for all it was worth, but at last: Polaris and Pascal. Two new architectures on new process nodes. Genuinely new GPUs at every price tier. Phenomenal gains in performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar. New product categories. There was a lot of feet-dragging—and considering the 300 million dollars-plus R&D hit AMD incurred to develop Polaris, that’s not surprising. But the next-gen is finally here. What do AMD and Nvidia have to offer? 

Nvidia: Holding the Fort

Nvidia and AMD have approached the new paradigm from completely different angles. Both strategies, however, are equally sound. With Maxwell over the last two years—and the immensely popular GTX 970 in particular—Nvidia’s secured an overwhelming degree of market share—by Q2 2015, they’d crossed the 80 percent threshold. Together with exclusive value additions like hardware PhysX, and the sheer mindshare Team Green enjoys among the PC gaming community, Nvidia maintains an almost unassailable position as market leader. Moreover, very high profit margins (the original GTX Titan was sold at a 90 percent margin!)  across their product stack means that they bring home a lot more cash than AMD, much of which goes towards R&D.

This is great for them, but the benefits aren’t quite as clear-cut for consumers. With their lopsided share of the pie, Nvidia doesn’t need to push the envelope either in terms of efficiency or bang-for-buck. Ironically, their best play at the moment is to apitalize on the tremendous market and mindshare advantage and bring out a less competitive product which will help them maintain high profit margins despite the expensive move to the 16nm process. With that in mind, the GTX 1080 is a remarkably unsurprising product. The 1080 isn’t Nvidia’s flagship per se. Ever since the GTX 700 series, Nvidia’s released their tier 2 GPU at the outset of the generation at the same circa-$500 dollar price-point as their old flagships, outing their tier-1 product months later with a $200 price premium. The Titan line offers a taste of that performance for what essentially amounts to massive early adopter’s tax.

The tier-2 GPUs (GK104, GM204, and in Pascal’s case, GP104), are up to 50 percent smaller than their big brothers—the GTX 980’s die size, at 398mm² is dwarfed by the 600mm² 980 Ti—and yet retail for nearly as much. With the GTX 1080, it’s the same story. The 980 Ti launched a year ago for $649. This was a massive 600mm² GPU with a 250W TDP and tremendous amounts of power on tap; at $649, you could almost call it a steal. The GTX 1080, outed two weeks ago, has a relatively frugal 180W TDP, and a die size of just 314mm².

Sure, it outperforms the 980 Ti by a respectable margin, (though a moderate overclock is enough to close the gap). But the bottom line is that the 980 Ti is a year-old 600mm² product which Nvidia outed for $649. The Founders’ Edition of the GTX 1080 costs $699.  Even factoring in low yields on the 16nm process, Nvidia could have brought a product to the market that’s 50-75 percent faster than the GTX 1080, while maintaining 980 Ti margins of profit. But considering their dominant position in the market, it’s not something they have to do. The Founder’s Edition concept serves to underline Nvidia’s approach here. There’s nothing particularly special about Founder’s Edition versions of the 1070 and the 1080, apart from their admittedly shiny aluminium coolers, and the fact that they’re available a few weeks ahead of AIB variants. Despite this, Founder’s Edition cards command a substantial premium, one that, in the 1080’s case, makes it more expensive than a 980 Ti.

The GTX 1080 is certainly a technical marvel: It’s the single fastest GPU on the market, and all it needs is a single eight-pin power connector. It’s a semi-viable single-card solution for 4K gaming. If you’re looking for the absolute best you can get right now, the 1080’s the way to go. But at the $699 asking price for the Founder’s Edition, it risks being made redundant in a hurry if (not when) the inevitable GTX 1080 Ti arrives.

When it comes to competitiveness, the GTX 1070 is Nvidia’s other Pascal play. This is a far better value proposition than the GTX 1080. Slightly faster than the Titan X/980 Ti, the GTX 1070’s Founder’s Edition sells for $449, with OEM variants expected to start at $379. This puts it in a unique position, pricing-wise: Old stock of the GTX 980 and R9 390X is selling in the vicinity of $450, while custom GTX 970 and R9 390 variants are to be had for $300-330. The 1070 clearly makes the 980 and 390X obsolete, offering upwards of 50 percent greater performance.

However, the price-premium over the 970 makes things a little murky: The cheapest, reference-clocked GTX 970s can actually be had for around $280 on Newegg, $160 less than the Founder’s Edition 1070. The 970’s not to be underestimated, especially if you’re planning on pairing it with a 1080p monitor. If 1080p/60 is the goal, a GTX 970 still makes a lot of sense. If you’re planning on gaming at 1440p or 4K, however, nothing comes close to the GTX 1070 as a single-card value proposition. Much of the GTX 1070’s value comes down to how you’re looking at it: As an upper midrange option, it’s pricey and definitely overkill for 1080p. However, it’s hands-down the best entry point to 4K gaming, apart from SLI/Crossfire configurations (more on that in a bit.)

AMD: The Price/Performance Game

What’s AMD doing with Polaris, then? In many ways, Team Red’sapproach to the new process node is the (polar) opposite. Sorry for the lame pun. Businesswise, AMD’s been in dire straits for quite a while. After Rory Reed stepped down in late 2014, Lisa Su had her work cut out as CEO: To turn around a company that was overstretched, losing out to competitors across multiple markets, and bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

While Dr. Su has certainly been trying her best, AMD posted losses in excess of $100 million just in the last quarter. Relatively cash-strapped, AMD’s best bet long-term bet is to try to claw back market share from Nvidia, to ship in volume and accept lower margins. With a market share that’s still below 30 percent as of this quarter, a high margin approach like the one adopted by Nvidia is simply not feasible for them. Instead, with Polaris and the RX 480, AMD’s doubled down on the fundamental benefit of a die shrink: You get more performance for less. Less power consumption, a smaller die size, and crucially, a lower unit cost that translates into a lower sticker price. While the gaming media tends to focus an awful lot on high-end PC gaming—4K, the Radeon Fury X, the 1080 and the like—flagship cards only account for a small fraction of total sales.

It’s in the $200-300 sweet-spot rang, with cards like the 660 Ti and the Radeon 7850, that high volume sales are to be had. While snazzy product position might tell you otherwise, this is where Nvidia and AMD earn their bread and butter in the consumer graphics market. AMD’s Polaris-based RX 480 is a unique value proposition: At its $199 starting price, the RX 480 offers nearly as much performance as a GTX 980 while costing half as much. The RX 480 is essentially the inverse of what Nvidia’s doing with the GTX 1080: rather than trying to maximize performance at the high end, the RX 480 capitalizes on the 14nm process’s space and power efficiency to bring high-end performance at a much lower price-point. In the lead-up to the 480X announcement, AMD talked a lot about expanding their “TAM,” or Total Addressable Market.

What makes the RX 480 unique in this respect is that it means different things to different people: For gamers on a budget (read a lot of people), the RX 480 is totally amazing: For the first time, a compromise-free 1080p/60 experience is within reach under $300. The GTX 970 was a phenomenal value proposition at launch, offering the ability to max out games at 1080p without breaking the bank. With its $199 price, the RX 480 takes this a step further, doubling the performance of a 960 at the same price point. Another point to note is that the GTX 970 is listed as the min spec for both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. A key challenge for dedicated VR systems is the price of admission. A typical Core i5/GTX 970 rig can run upwards of $700 which, when added to the cost of a Rift makes for quite an investment. An RX 480 paired with the FX-6350 will cut VR’s cost of admission down drastically and let in people who were put off by the high cost.

Lastly, the RX 480 is a very interesting proposition in Crossfire configurations, and this again has wider market implications. While a single RX 480 can stay toe-to-toe with a GTX 970, preliminary data shows that a pair of 480s in Crossfire perform roughly on par with a GTX 1080. A major roadblock with midrange dual-GPU configurations is that the GPU savings are largely eroded by the need to buy a compatible motherboard and a higher-capacity PSU. Compared to SLI, Crossfire-compatible motherboards are available at lower prices, starting from the $70 Gigabyte B85M-D3H.

Even better, two RX 480s only have a combined TDP of 300W, meaning that a middling 600W power supply ought to be enough to handle them. While AMD has no plans of releasing a high-end single card solution until Vega in 2017, RX 480 Crossfire setups could well be AMD’s 4K dark horse, trading blows with a GTX 1080 for less than the price of a GTX 1070 Founder’s Edition. AMD’s clearly got its work cut out for it—the market remains Nvidia-dominated and the company continues to post losses quarter after quarter, but if the RX 480 is anything to go by, the future might not be as gloomy as it seems for Team Red.

Whether you’re talking Pascal or Polaris, this year’s GPU offerings from both Nvidia and AMD shake up the market in a big way. What do you think about Pascal and Polaris? Let us know!

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 7^th gen A-series APUs pair entry-level Excavator cores with an on-chip Radeon graphics component.

GDC seems to be the happening place to be if you have any interest at all in the future of game tech- in addition to all the news on virtual reality and DirectX 12 that we seem to be getting, AMD held a panel to debut their own upcoming next generation Polaris 10 GPU, manufactured using a 14nm fabrication process, which fully supports technologies like DirectX 12 and VR.

The most striking feature for Polaris appears to be just how power efficient it is; AMD claimed that Polaris has an “industry-leading performance-per-watt,” and it is something that they plan to improve with their future GPUs too- including the Vega GPU, which is planned for 2017.

Polaris appears to be quite powerful- it seems to easily outperform the current leading GPUs on the market (though its real world performance remains to be seen), and it may give AMD the edge over Nvidia going forward, especially as we move towards untested new technologies like DirectX 12.

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.