AMD has provided a glimpse of its upcoming 2016 Polaris GPU architecture, highlighting a range of architectural improvements.
Some of the improvements include HDR monitor support, and “industry-leading” performance-per-watt.
AMD’s Polaris 14nm FinFET GPUs deliver a generational jump in power efficiency, said the company.
The GPUs are designed for fluid frame rates in graphics, gaming, VR, and multimedia applications running on small form-factor computer designs.
The Polaris architecture features AMD’s 4th generation Graphics Core Next architecture, a next-generation display engine with support for HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, and next-generation multimedia features including 4K h.265 encoding and decoding.
AMD expects shipments of Polaris architecture-based GPUs to begin in mid-2016.
As far as performance is concerned, internal tests over at AMD demonstrate Star Wars Battlefront maintaining a steady 60fps on medium settings at 1080p, and all why while consuming 60% less power than what a GTX 950 needs to perform the same task – that’s a considerable bump to power efficiency.
Performance comparable to the GTX 950 clearly points to Polaris being an entry-level architecture, and not meant to replace Fiji (powering their Fury cards) or Grenada (used in the R9 390 and R9 390X).
That task is meant for their Greenland architecture, the likely successor to Fiji and opposition to NVIDIA’s mighty Pascal.
What Polaris will mean, however, is far more capable, compact gaming devices.
That’s because the more performance you can squeeze out of each watt, the more you’ll be able to achieve with limited power and heat budgets in mobile as well as ultra-small devices.
And because Polaris sports all of the features gamers might require, it’s that much more appealing.
What Polaris has also demonstrated is the future of gaming in general because it means NVIDIA should also be able to squeeze similar performance/power figures out of their 14nm FinFET architectures.
Written in collaboration with an article that originally appeared on MyBroadband and is republished with permission.
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Actually NVIDIA’s new architecture will be produced on TSCM’s 16nm node, not 14nm like the article states. AMD will use both GloFo 14nm and TSCM 16nm nodes but have not yet confirmed which devices will make use of which node. The demonstrated polaris chip however was produced by GloFo on 14nm.