Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

[JEMC]

se7en7thre3 said:

JEMC said:

It looks like AMD will use its Polaris 11 chips for notebooks, which are about half the power of Polaris 10. Don't get fooled by their naming, the 480M won't be using the chip of the RX 480, but the chip inside the RX 460.

Speaking of Polaris 11, what is your take on the possibly of the chip being in the NX console?  When you factor in tdp, and Nintendo coming in  next gen at around previous gen performance, would this make more sense than say, a high end nvidia mobile chip (too expensive?), or 28nm where the tdp would still be too high?  

Everything involved in NX is quite confusing and hard to guess.

I'd say that the option of Nintendo using an Nvidia chip is minuscule. When it comes to hardware, Nintendo tends to be very conservative and that makes them keep working with the same partners gen after gen. Given that they have always worked with ATI/AMD and that we've never heard of any problems between them, I don't see why they'll change to Nvidia (specially after how things went between Nvidia and MSoft and Sony in previous gens).

As for Polaris 11/RX 460, if the leaked 3DMark score is real, then it's a bit slower than the HD 7870, but faster than the GTX 750Ti that DigitalFoundry uses in its budget PC build against the PS4/X1 (and that usually performs better than the consoles). It's not a bad option but I would personally prefer if they go with the Tonga chip that powers the R9 285 or the R9 380 running at lower frequencies to reduce power consumption.

The problem is that, given that we don't know what kind of machine will the NX be and what's Nintendo's strategy with it, we don't know what power requirements it may need in terms of raw power or efficiency.