I want to know how the 470 measure against the 480... because it could be a good target to Crossfires, like the 5770 was on its days.. the most popular card on that series because on XF it could measure to 5870 and more for less money. If its arround the same as the 380x, it will be a nice target to cheap good performing PC.

The Radeon RX 470 has a 12.5% reduction in shaders. If everything else stayed equal hardware wise and you were shader bound you should see a 12.5% performance reduction.
At most I would expect 20% less performance depending on clocks/Texture Mapping Units/Render Output pipelines and the load, in ideal situations the performance should be insignificant.

It should be decent in crossfire, good value for money after the initial launch and prices/inventory settle.

With that said, if it isn't $150, then you will be better off with a pair of 480 4Gb cards in crossfire.

What production process? It's 14nm like the rest of the Polaris 10 lineup.

APU's aren't built around the concept of taking desktop GPU's and throwing them together with a CPU.
What AMD does is reserve a % of the die space in terms of transister counts and whacks a GPU that will "fit" into that space to meet various price/performance targets.

AMD *will* have Graphics Core Next 4 APU's, which is the same technology derived from Polaris/Radeon 480, but it will be scaled differently.
Not only that but they will be limited  by Dual Channel DDR configurations unless they allow for motherboard companies to implement a Sideport kind of concept with soldered memory on the motherboard dedicated to the GPU.
Otherwise a fast GPU is essentially wasted.

AMD has also given out plans to build a 300w~ APU with a ton of GPU hardware directed towards the HPC market, which should be faster than the Playstation 4.

Game developers can and do just that. AMD and nVidia cannot force developers to do anything, but they do work with all major developers and publishers to build Multi-GPU "profiles" for their drivers.
Pretty much every major PC release these days has support for Multiple GPU's.... Unless of course you buy your games from the Windows Store which are confined to the Universal Windows Platform. (Ugh.)

What you are describing about having two GPU's seen as one has actually been tried before, known as Lucid's "Hydra Engine" it was a dedicated chip on some motherboards... It even allowed you to pair an AMD GPU with an nVidia GPU, the way it works is it intercepts Direct X/OpenGL calls and divides the work up that way.
However it was buggy, had artifacts, less than optimal performance and it was expensive.

There are Pro's and Con's to AMD and nVidia's approach though, they can retain a degree of quality, fix issues and provide optimal performance, the downside is of course compatability, but nVidia and AMD are pretty proactive on that approach, I've been running Multi-GPU's since the late-90's, things are certainly fantastic compared to then, most games today do support Crossfire/SLI or will soon after a games release.

I think the next step to making Crossfire/SLI more feasible is to allow the community to build, test and optimize profiles for games and have the community vote for them and then propogated via the cloud to everyone.

AMD themselves are only going to release a 4gb version but other manufacturers are allowed to release 8 gb versions aswell. A RX 470 8gb at $179 is great value and will likely be my next card.

Anyone thinking a 1060 OC'd can reach a 980Ti /1070 is being overly optimistic. It will probably have a 10-15% ceiling ...TOPS in perf scaling from reference.

Its clear Nvidia won this round yet again. A true 120w TDP card packing that punch, and hitting those clock speeds is impressive.

The 8GB variants of whatever AMD puts out in this power range or below doesn't impress me whatsoever because the GPU's just aren't fast enough to do all that much with it, let alone at the target resolutions these cards are made for.

I'm in for a good value/performance ratio, I would buy a rx480 or a couple of 470 on crossfire. my limit is arround 299$. If it is 150$ or less, and crossfire is effective, I could reeplace my current GTX960 with a couple of those cheaper 470... or Just a 480.. A single 470 could perform better than my current one, and a couple could give added performance on crosffire with high demanding games that are optimized for it. Is a Win-Win option if the price is as intended. 150$ or lower.

The 1060 will need to be overclocked by 50% on the core to match the 1070, that would mean a clock of 2259Mhz, that assumes it doesn't become bandwidth bound.

People are managing to get the 1070 to 2ghz- 2.1ghz under water and with over volting, you should actually be able to push a 1060 past the 1070's speed, but at that point you are probably better off just getting a 1070.

The 1060 though is built on a smaller die, it's not a die-harvested 1080 part, so it should be interesting to see what happens on that front in regards to clock scaling and boosting the volts.


As for the 8Gb cards, I agree, AMD's offerings are uninspired and get beaten soundly by the competition. But it does win on Price and to allot of people, that is far more important, so don't discount them out of the game just yet.

Wait for the Geforce 1060 to drop and for the Radeon 480's inventory levels to increase, you might be able to get a 4Gb 480 for under $200 if things go our way.
Always start with a single powerfull card first, then add a second one a year+ later or when you need the extra performance or when you have the cash.

I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a "Bad' graphics card, just a bad price... And that's AMD main strength, price.

Well, I'm looking to buy at the end of the year or later, not now.. I'm just waiting to all cards releases and that the market get calm after releases. I'm not in a rush, my 960 is stil a capable GPU.

I know our discussion is a few days old, but I've realized something that may refute the idea that the 490 is a dual GPU card with Polaris 10 chips.

And it comes from AMD's new naming scheme, and the slide that came with it:

Realize that the tier number gets determined by the memory controller:

9: >256bit
8 - 7: 256bit
6 - 5: 128bit
4: 64bit

An hypothetical 2x480 GPUs card will still have the same 256bit controllers so, by AMD's own rule, it couldn't be named RX 490. If anything, it could be the RX 480X2.

Why are you assiming that there will be 3 Vega cards? The speculation around those chips talk about Vega 10 & 11 (likely because of the Polaris 10 & 11 codenames). With that in mind, AMD could use Vega 11 with a 384 or 512bit bus and GDDR5X memory as the RX 490, and leave the big Vega 10 chip with HBM2 as the new Fury card.

One thing that could give this idea more ground are the rumors about AMD trying to launch Vega earlier when at GDC they mentioned the high costs of HBM 2 as one of the reasons to not launch it until 2017. They could prioritize the development of the smaller Vega chip with "cheap" GDDR5X memory to try to compete with Nvidia's current high end cards.

Last gen AMD had way too many cards on the market, with Fury, R9 Nano and R9 390X, for example, basically competed against each other. AMD would be stupid to make the same mistake again.

But I agree with you that between the 2304 SPs of the 480 and the rumored 4096 SPs of the full Vega chip, there's enough room for another two cards with 2816 and 3584 SPs respectively (those are the specs of the 390X and Fury).