AMD’s Polaris Shoots for the Stars

Features
By ( Maximum PC ) published

AMD RTG Polaris Slide 03

The North Star

And we may as well cut straight to the chase and let you know that Polaris isn’t slated to launch until around the middle of the year, so in about six months. Which isn’t too surprising, considering the cadence of GPU launches, but if you were hoping to upgrade right now, you’ll have to postpone things a bit or stick with existing products.

There’s something else to discuss as well, and that’s the positioning of the Polaris part we were shown. Basically, it’s AMD’s entry-level GPU, rather than a high-end competitor; so again, you might need to wait longer if you’re hoping to get something faster than a Fury X. Of course, just because AMD was demonstrating their entry-level Polaris part, that doesn’t mean they can’t do midrange and high-end launches in the same time frame, but we would look more toward the fall for the high-end product launch.

But what does 14nm FinFET mean, what other Polaris chips might we see, and what new technologies are being baked into the fourth generation GCN architecture (which we’ll call GCN4, though admittedly it looks more like GCN 1.3)? Let’s dig into the meat of the announcement and talk about some of the cool and interesting things that are coming.

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred's love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.