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AMD Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 arrive August 4 and August 8

With low TDPs and pricing, AMD's latest are ideal for 1080p and e-sports players.

AMD Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 arrive August 4 and August 8

While AMD has focused on the mainstream marvel that is the RX 480 for the past few months, it does have two more cards based on its 14nm Polaris architecture on the way, the RX 470 and the RX 460. The company has finally dropped technical specifications as well as release dates: August 4 for the RX 470 and August 8 for the RX 460.

Pricing isn't yet known, but we should get it confirmed soon. We'd expect the RX 470 to cost about £150 and the RX 460 around £100.

The RX 470 is based on a cut-down version of the Polaris 10 chip used in the RX 480. It sports 32 Compute Units (CUs), down from 36 in the RX 480, resulting in 2048 stream processors. Base clock and boost clock speeds are slightly lower too at 926MHz and 1206MHz respectively, while 4GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 6.6GHz on a 256-bit bus for 211GB/s of memory bandwidth. 128 texture units and 32 ROPs complete the package, which AMD says will push up to 4.9 teraflops of FP32 performance, down from the 5.8 teraflops of the RX 480.

The RX 470, as you would expect, pulls less power than the RX 480 with a TDP of 120W. That's plenty under the limit of the 6-pin power connector, and should ensure the company won't face another power draw issue like it did with early models of the RX 480. FreeSync and HDMI 2.0 are also supported. AMD claims the RX 470 will run most games at ultra settings at 1080p at above 60FPS, including the likes of Battlefield 4, Doom, and Hitman.

Even more power-friendly is the RX 460, which boasts a TDP of less than 75W and is based on the smaller Polaris 11 chip. It's an x8 PCIe card too, rather than the more common x16, but that shouldn't present a problem for the kind of performance the card will push. Primarily aimed at e-sports players and gamers on an extreme budget, the RX 460 sports 14 CUs, 896 stream processors, 48 texture units, and 16 ROPs. The GPU runs at 1090MHz and boosts to 1200MHz, while memory oddly runs faster than on the RX 470 at 7GHz. It's coupled to a more compact 128-bit bus, resulting in 112GB/s of bandwidth. AMD claims the RX 460 will churn through most e-sports games at hundreds of frames per second on high settings.

Unlike the RX 480, neither the RX 470 or RX 460 will be available in a reference design, with partners like Asus and MSI instead releasing cards with their own cooling solutions. The RX 460 will also make an appearance in some high-end gaming laptops too, starting with HP's Omen. AMD claims the RX 460 is roughly 20 percent faster than Nvidia's GTX 960M in games like Overwatch at 1080p, which is particularly notable as the GTX 960M features a similar 60W-75W TDP.

The RX 460 and RX 470 mark the end (probably) of what has been a tumultuous few months in the graphics card market, with both AMD and Nvidia releasing a slew of new models based on new architectures. Earlier this week, AMD also unveiled its new line of professional graphics cards—dubbed the Radeon Pro WX Series—which are essentially the same as the RX line, but with professional driver support and beautiful lapis lazuli shroud.

The top-of-the-range card—the Radeon Pro SSG—is based on the Fiji architecture, however, and supports up to 1TB of NAND flash via two M.2 PCIe slots on the graphics card board. It costs $9999 (or upwards of £8000).

Channel Ars Technica