AMD RX 470 & 460 Official Benchmarks & Specs Leaked – Launch Dates Set For August 4th & 8th

AMD's hotly anticipated RX 470 and RX 460 graphics cards are launching early next month according to leaked press material from the Radeon Technologies Group. The release date has been confirmed to be August 4th for the 470 and August 8th for the 460. The leak also includes details about the hardware specifications of each of the two cards as well as their performance and market positioning compared to their Radeon 200 series predecessors. So let's dig straight in!

AMD Radeon RX 470 Up To 140% Faster Than The R9 270 - Features 2048 GCN 4.0 Cores, 1206Mhz Boost Clock & 120W TDP

The Radeon RX 470 is the second desktop graphics card coming out of the skunkworks of the Radeon Technologies Group that's based on the Polaris 10 GPU. More specifically, Polaris 10 Pro the slightly cut back variant of Polaris 10. The RX 470 is the replacement to the R9 270 with a promised performance improvement of 1.5X to 2.4X depending on the game.

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That's a hefty performance uplift, despite the utilization of cut back silicon. Which comes in at just 256 GCN stream processors under its big brother the RX 480 and the full fat Polaris 10 XT GPU which powers it. The Render Output Units stay the same at 32. And the Texture Mapping Units get a proportional cut to the stream processors, down to 128 from 144 in the 480. With 2048 GCN 4.0 cores clocked at 1206Mhz the RX 470 is just a tenth of  a TFLOP per second shy of hitting 5 TFLOPs of peak single precision compute.

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The slightly lower compute performance means that the RX 470 is content with slightly slower GDDR5 RAM to feed the chip. So the RX 470 is equpped with 6.6Gbps GDDR5 memory chips vs the 8Gbps chips on the 480.  Running across the same 256bit memory interface this generates 211 GB/s of memory bandwidth, 45 GB/s less than the RX 480.

Radeon RX 460 Up To 30% Faster Than The R7 260X - Features 896 GCN 4.0 Cores, 1200Mhz Boost Clock & <75W TDP

The Radeon RX 460 is the entry level 400 series desktop graphics card and the first to feature the tiny Polaris 11 GPU. Just like the RX 470, the RX 460 is based on cut down silicon rather than a fully enabled chip. We have yet to see AMD announce any desktop graphics card based on the full Polaris 11 XT GPU. The 460 is based on Polaris 11 Pro, with 896 GCN 4.0 Cores, 128 fewer than what Polaris 11 XT has.

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The RX 460 also features a 128bit memory interface, exactly half that of the Polaris 10 based RX 480 and 470 graphics card. Which makes sense considering that we're talking about less than half the stream processors here. A 128-bit memory interface in the 460's case actually means that each stream processor in the 460 has access to more bandwidth compared to the 470 and per teraflop/s.

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Clocked at exactly 1.2Ghz the 460 achieves a peak FP32 performance output of 2.2 TFLOPs. The memory subsystem is based on the aforementioned 128-bit memory interface, connected to four 7Gbps GDDR5 memory chips for a total of 112 GB/s of bandwidth.  The whole package folds in neatly into a frugal <75W TDP. The RX 460 is poised to deliver 20-30% higher framerates than its predecessor the R7 260X across the board and do it while drawing less power too.

The RX 470 is launching August 4th and the RX 460 is launching four days later on August 8th. Pricing has yet to be confirmed however it's believed that the RX 470 will debut at $179-$149 for the 8GB and 4GB versions. While the RX 460 is believed to debut at the suggested retail prices of $119-$99 for the 4GB and 2GB versions.

AMD RX 400 Series Specifications