AMD announces the Radeon RX 460 and RX 470, its new Polaris graphics cards

AMD Polaris E3

At the PC Gaming Show at E3 today, AMD announced the Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards, two new cards which join the US$199 RX 480 (for the 4GB version) it unveiled in the run-up to Computex 2016.

The Radeon RX 480 was designed to provide the horsepower required for VR gaming at an affordable price point. For instance, the company claims that two RX 480s in CrossFire can outdo a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, all for less than US$500. Having said that, AMD said that the RX 460 and 470 will be VR-capable as well, but it remains to be seen how these claims will hold up in real-world testing.

Another front that AMD is hoping to compete on is mobile gaming. We knew from the outset that Polaris would be geared toward notebooks, and AMD says its RX series cards can enable console-class performance and bring about a new wave of thin and light notebooks with enough power to take on even triple A titles at 1080p.

To be specific, the Radeon RX 470 is targeted at delivering 60fps at 1080p, while the RX 460 is for competitive gamers looking for a compact, lower-powered card (only 75 watts!) that can provide high frame rates in games like League of Legends. Other features that are supported include things like DirectX 12, Vulkan, HDR gaming and video, and H.265 encoding and decoding.

Both cards are based on the 14nm FinFET process, but the interesting thing is that they appear to be lacking a proper cooling shroud when CEO Lisa Su held them up on stage.

Unfortunately, AMD was a little sparse on the details, and specifications, prices, or release dates were not announced at the event.