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AMD’s RX 480 is ready for VR, and costs the same as a cheap smartphone

Historically, AMD has played second fiddle to NVIDIA in the graphics card game, but from the details revealed about the Radeon RX 480 at Computex, this could change.

The first port of call for AMD is virtual reality. VR has become synonymous with gaming at the bleeding edge and it makes sense then that AMD wants to push its cards as an affordable means to being able to strap screens to your face. By affordable we aren’t talking $500, AMD has said the Radeon RX 480 4GB edition will start at $199 (R3 116,08).

Look, that price is subject to import duties and the like when it makes its way to South Africa but even if we’re overestimating how much those are we could be looking at a card that is VR ready retailing for under R5 000.

“As we look to fully connect and immerse humanity through VR, cost remains the daylight between VR being only for the select few, and universal access for everyone,” Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at Radeon Technologies, Raja Koduri said in a statement.

Sadly, AMD only teased the Rx 480 at Computex and left out the full technical specifications of the card. From the details that were revealed however, we know that the card will be available in the US from the 29th June in both 4GB and 8GB iterations. That GDDR5 memory will flow through a wide 256-bit memory bus and can reach memory clock speeds of up to 8Gbps.

Compared to AMD’s last flagship GPU, the R9 390X, this new GPU is also less power-hungry, a lot less.

AMD claims that the RX 480 will draw 150W which is more than likely with thanks to the smaller 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. This also translates into what we hope are lower thermal temperatures as well.

So what does this all mean then? Well for starters its the probably the first salvo we’ve seen fired from Team Red at Team Green since, hell, the HD 7990 and even that was a dual-GPU card that ate through electricity.

Secondly, the fact that AMD is pushing the VR aspect so heavily means that this card is likely going to perform well enough to actually silence the critics who believe AMD is dead in the water.

There is however a downside to all of this; we aren’t sure whether we’re Team Green or Team Red anymore.

[Source – AMD]

 

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