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AMD to release two Polaris GPUs in 2016

AMD is launching plenty of new architecture this year, with Zen CPUs due out at the end of 2016 in addition to the first Polaris graphics chips. AMD introduced us to Polaris earlier this month, with a presentation on the first new chip and now, the Radeon team has confirmed that there will be at least two Polaris graphics card launches this year.

The first GPU is currently known as Polaris 10 and is considered to deliver similar performance to a console, designed with small form-factors in mind. The second is known as Polaris 11 and will likely be a more high-end chip. It is worth noting that these aren't the final names of these GPUs, they will still carry the Radeon name, Polaris just refers to the architecture.

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Exact release dates are currently unknown but apparently this will be AMD's biggest performance jump in several generations. We already know a bit about AMD's GTX 950 equivalent card but information on the performance of higher-end chips is currently not known.

KitGuru Says: It will be interesting to see what AMD can bring to the table with the launch of its Polaris architecture later this year. Are any of you planning on upgrading your graphics card this year? 

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31 comments

  1. Yes I am planning on upgrade this year, but more likely to Pascal than Polaris.
    Polaris to me are outdated nuclear warheads.

  2. Polaris were missiles not nuclear warheads. its also the name of the north star.

  3. Pascal to me is old and outdated, and reminds me of an old mathematician and inventor named Blaise pascal from the 1600’s. Far more outdated than any nuclear warhead developed in the last 70 years or so.

  4. i knoww, it was a joke.

  5. “Are any of you planning on upgrading your graphics card this year? ” – Are you kidding, of course i am!

  6. Yes I’be been refusing to upgrade my old 7970 with technology from the same generation. Let’s hope the price is right at launch or I’ll just keep waiting

  7. Yeah I am kind of tired of 28nm GPUs too.

  8. I had that card up until yesterday, I upgraded to a GTX 970, substantial improvement to graphics and gaming quality (FPS/graphics and Supports 144Hz, sadly the HD 7970 only supports 120Hz)

  9. Should have bought a 390

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  12. should wait until 16nm then buy old gen, especially as they had a decent card already.

  13. graet, and with Polaris coming out with the first DX12 title Deus EX: Mankind

    http://www.gpunit.com/index.php/2016/01/21/dues-ex-mankind-divided-and-amds-new-polaris-release-date-set-to-align/

  14. the 7970 does in fact support 144hz, dunno where you get your info from…. I am running 144hz right now on my asus 24″. when I had crossfire going, both crossfire bridges were required in order for 144hz to work, otherwise with only 1 ribbon cable, 120hz was max…..

  15. yeah man I too have yet to upgrade from my 7970, with fallout4 on max settings i get 20-50fps depending on area, if i drop it to lowest quality i get 80-144 (set max fps to 144 since the game flips out when you have higher fps lol)

  16. Or instead they could have got the 390. The 8GB of VRAM really puts it above the 390 at this price point.

  17. 7870 here, still not wanting to upgrade, I feel you even though I have less performance.
    Works good enough for me.

  18. I used to upgrade when I could double my frames rates for 300$. I think Moores law and inflation have killed that plan. But still, a 970 would give me 50% more performance tops for 400-500$ cdn, not worth it on a 1080p 60hz screen when the 7970 still runs everything great.

  19. If the Polaris stuff is any good, I’m up for getting a 14 or 16nm card from AMD. I wish they’d kept the ATi brand though, I liked it better and thought it was cooler.

  20. Yeah, the 7970’s still a great card, even today. Neither AMD nor Nvidia have made something that makes it worth upgrading (imho) if you want a good price/performance for your upgrade considering that you can still run modern games on high or better settings at 60+fps most of the time.

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  22. Is it worth slapping another 7970 along side what you have? Even if its not the same brand. I did that with my 6870, bought one then slapped another along side it a year and a half down the track. I was lucky enough to still find the exact same one though. Not everything used the 6870’s well in xfire though. I heard it was just the 6870’s that didn’t xfire well. You might have better luck.

  23. I looked into that, but people wanted a lot for my exact same card. And besides needing a bigger psu and other potential issues, I’d ultimately be investing in an obsolete setup that won’t have the latest game optimizations down the road. And xfire is not approved for vr.

  24. soon as my screen was ready I had everything organised, 1920×1080 and custom res, 144Hz failed and would not work, windows wouldn’t accept that “mode”, worked 100% for 120Hz.
    I then upgraded to the GTX 970, in Nvidia control panel made a custom resolution using 1920×1080 + 144Hz on default setting just like I did with AMD and the Nvidia one actually worked…didn’t think more of it, I also found that any reference to HD 7970 and Refresh rate showed multiple posts about 120Hz, no 144Hz was to be found!

  25. Take this from a guy that HAS the HD 7970 setup…

    I have the

    i7 4790k 4.6Ghz
    16GB ram 1866Mhz
    Maximus Vii Hero motherboard
    2x HD 7970, ASUS and Club3D
    850W gold certified corsair PSU

    had both in, Xfire, everything is amazing…you’ve looked at the specs and performance boost to Xfire, it looks amazing….nobody tells you about the ugly screen tearing that follows…one thing AMD did terribly is Xfire, works horribly and you hardly get a boost to your frames in any game except for the odd FPS game like csgo where it stabilizes your frames, I had them in for a month, I sold the ASUS the following week, stuffed up the shirt physics of Fifa 15 with black triangles for edges coming off the sharp sides of the shirts…terrible stuff..

    I have now put my Club3D to rest and finally trying out Nvidia with one of their GTX 970s, I see why nobody wants to go back to AMD…its pretty brilliant how well everything works.

  26. Yeah can see what you are saying. I made the jump to Intel a couple of years back and have been thinking about the next card on my list. Thankfully AMD “seem” to be putting some effort into their software sides of things.

    GCN doesn’t seem like it was a very good architecture for DX11 and I believe, for what its worth, that it needs an API like Mantle(Vulkan) or DX12. I am probably talking out of my butt cheeks but to get any real performance out of GCN DX12 seems to be the way to go. Now I have no idea if this will fix stupid issues like yours who knows. Just speculating really. If someone shows me I am happy to admit I am wrong.

    But if Polaris is anything but amazing then I might jump ship and trade the ol’ R9 290 in for a shiny Pascal. I had a terrible experience with my 6870’s running in xfire. It was slow and hot. The cards didn’t overclock by anything other than 50Mhz. Damn XFX reference cards and cooler. It is a shame because AMD have enormous amounts compute power even on my old card and AMD clearly win in this regard, but gaming it has to be NVidia. I don’t know what voodoo s**** they are pulling but it works. Sure NVidia get their driver issues too. I know plenty who have had them. But overall customer satisfaction seems to be NVidia. I know so many mates who really know their s**** and would genuinely be happy to support AMD provided AMD brought out something worthwhile because all they want is the best product for their $. I hope Polaris and Zen for that matter are both amazing.

    Good chat.

  27. why were you setting a custom resolution? if your monitor is not native 144hz and you are basically trying to overclock it, well that’s your fault

    all you need to do is right click your desktop > display settings > scroll down to the “advanced display settings” text you can click on > scroll down to “display adapter settings” text you can click on > when that window pops up go to the monitor tab > and select 144hz. there is no reason to do any kind of “custom resolution” crap, either 3rd party or via amd’s new drivers. its all ready to go. sounds like you failed because you tried to do some stupid custom resolution and got some part of the setup wrong.

  28. Windows doesn’t recognize 144Hz, only 120Hz

    I am forced to create a a custom res with that screen refresh rate, this isn’t the first time i’ve heard of people having to do custom resolutions.

    I went to mode in display settings and 1920×1080 @120Hz and a bunch of others, no 144Hz, you need to set a custom res @144 for it to work, AMD or Nvidia with windows 10 for some reason.

    BenQ XL2730Z is my monitor =)

  29. Don’t forget you can CrossFire 7970 with R9 280/x if you can find it cheaper or less used than 7970.
    Its worth if you don’t spend over 100$-120$
    I’d just wait for Polaris and sell the 7970 on eBay …its only 1-2 months of wait

  30. I totally agree, there’s no way I’m dumping this card for anything currently available, I’m hyped for Polaris though future proofing is the way I’m going with true DX12 titles coming online soon. I can’t wait

  31. Thats a strange opinion considering nobody has any performance benchmarks.