AMD's new Radeon RX 470 unleashes 1080p 60FPS gaming for just $179

AMD has officially launched its new Radeon RX 470, the second graphics card powered by the new Polaris architecture and made on the 14nm FinFET process. AMD's new Radeon RX 470 starts at $179 and is capable of 1080p 60FPS gaming on a 120W TDP. I have received a few Radeon RX 470 models, with the SAPPHIRE Nitro RX 470 4GB review going up very soon - but I thought I'd brief you on what to expect from the new $179 graphics card from AMD.

Inside, we have 2048 stream processors with up to 4.9 TFLOPs of performance and 32 compute units, this is joined by 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 RAM at up to 7Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus, providing 211GB/sec memory bandwidth.

The Polaris architecture is about as future-proof as you can get, including DisplayPort 1.4 which supports up to 8K 30Hz displays as well as 4K 120Hz which isn't far away. HDMI 2.0 is finally here, after the Fiji architecture being let down without 4K 60FPS support through HDMI 1.4 at the time. We also have HDR display, which will allow High Dynamic Range monitors to provide Polaris-based graphics cards like the Radeon RX 470 with an experience that really is like no other. The Radeon RX 470 has FreeSync support, with over 80 monitors powered by FreeSync now on the market.

Performance wise the Radeon RX 470 packs quite the punch for a graphics card priced at $179, with AMD touting that it is up to 2.4x faster than the Radeon R9 270 in games like DOOM. I have the SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon RX 470 4GB on hand and have my review nearly finished (it'll be ready very soon), and the results are true - 1080p 60FPS in virtually all the games on the market.

AMD has put considerable effort into the Polaris architecture, which results in display technologies like DP1.4 supporting up to 8K displays - but we also have support for HEVC. HEVC is capable of the same resolutions we have now like 1080p, 1440p and 4K - but it supports double the frame rate. So now HEVC on a Polaris-based graphics card like the Radeon RX 470 supports 1080p120, 1440p120 and 4K60. 10-bit HEVC can be enjoyed on HDR-capable displays and HDR-capable content from Netflix and Amazon.

Vulkan has been making some waves on the internet lately with massive performance gains for AMD graphics cards in DOOM, which now supports Vulkan. Vulkan offers up to 30% more performance on the Radeon RX 480 over the OpenGL version of the game. DirectX 12 is also another big deal, and AMD is pacing itself well with Ashes of the Singularity seeing up to 40% more performance over the DX11 build of the game.