Rumors of AMD Polaris 30 coming out in October

If Navi isn’t supposed to come out until late 2019, why wouldn’t they refresh Polaris? “Late 2019” is still a year out.

I have been waiting for the 2050, but Nvidia is holding that back.
Something nice for 120 bucks that beats the 1050 would be nice.
With a 1080 60hz screen thousand dollar gpu’s don’t excite me much.
AMD may not compete at the 2080ti level but they can do well on the low to mid-range.

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I betcha the 2050 will be a rebadged 1060 anyway. But yeah, cheaper.

I just upgraded to a Vega 56. If a new Polaris is on the horizon, it would probably behoove me to dump my old RX 580 before it becomes worthless.

OTOH, I’m not sure how credible these rumors are. It started with Phoronix finding a new PCI device ID in a driver. That could be just about anything…

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Didn’t post everything relating to this in the original, as the other stuff is a bit further removed. But, it seems a release sometime by the end of the year matches some earlier timelines and vague promises.

As for why release a new Polaris refresh with the new process around the corner, there’s also some indications that the next major cards will not be gaming cards, but will be targeting various industries for the higher margins. From a lot of things going on the last few years under Lisa Su, it looks like they’ve decided to put more resources into attacking the CPU business, and secondary to that custom-gpu, rather than general consumer gaming gpus. AMD is still rebuilding itself and doesn’t have the money to stretch itself too much anymore if they want to be competitive in any market.

Supposedly, the last release was really for Apple, and on Apples timeline, as that’s where the money was provided. Similarly, it looks like they’re now just focused on building for the PS5, and probably the next major gamer gpu will be some variation on whatever they build for the PS5 on on a similar timeline (which may not be until 2020 even). There’s some indication from some interviews that at least Vega 7nm will not see a mainline gamer market release, or not much of one, and who knows for sure about Navi, but if it won’t be till October of next year for that, they’ll want something out in the meantime so there’s not a 2 1/2 year gap between cards.

I think it’s just fortunate for AMD that Nvidia appears to have further abandoned the mid-range market. AMD doesn’t have to release something big, they just have to release something slightly better, which a refresh would do.

I’d really like a nice, solid 1440p card to release. My 980 is beginning to show its age, and I’d like to switch teams for a few years. I hope we get something fast and power efficient. Haven’t been red team since my 4890 which was a killer card. But I’m picky about power consumption and heat. Fingers crossed, because I’m too frustrated with Nv to give them money, and I don’t need much to run 1440 ultrawide.

What are you talking about? Nvidia didn’t abandon the mid-range market. They have the 1050 at $130-$150 for decent 1080p gaming, the 1050ti at $170-$200 for great 1080p, the and the 1060 at $220-$280 for maxed-out 1080p and fine 1440p.

They haven’t released 20-series for those cards yet. Obviously they will, although my guess is they will be rebadged Pascal at lower prices.

The 1050 / 1050 Ti released nearly 2 years ago, and were still slightly below the point I’m thinking of. The 1060 was before that, and didn’t get a Ti treatment with the 1070 and 1080.

If the 2080/2080Ti pricing is any indication, I’d expect them to be much more expensive than the last time around. So, if the 2060 ends up at $350 or so on release this time, I’d consider that out of mid-range. If the 2050 comes out at all and is $260-300, that would be pushing it unless it really beats the rumored RX 680 (which, granted, we don’t know the pricing for either).

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with, but even if they do release a well priced 2050 and 2060, if they don’t do it before an RX 680 or whatever comes out, that’s a good win for AMD in mid range.

I really don’t trust it will be rebadged Pascal at LOWER prices. These tariffs won’t go away, so they will find that as the perfect opportunity to rebase the MSRP higher to compensate. So no, it won’t be at lower prices, it will be just like the RTX launch, except the inflated prices are for a different reason, supply chain related.

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With Navi beeing built for consoles (the PS5 in particular), I don´t think it will be useable as a PC gaming card. Mobile, console or embeded, maybe, but not a full fledged desktop GPU.

So AMD could have forked their GPU lines. One team got the goal to optimize for desktop (abundance of power, good cooling, etc) and the other was set aside to listen to Sonys wishes and desires (low power consumption, 1440p to upfake to 4k, 30Hz-ish).
One team changed the fundamentals and got to Navi, the other is now at Polaris 30.

idk, i’m no expert in GPU architecture, but I don’t think its that much of a stretch to imagine a architecture designed around consoles being good for desktop gaming as well. Especially considering consoles like the xbox one x. Also, it seems like splitting up the the cpu into different parts and manufacturing them separately is the future of chip design, with Intel seeming to be moving that way as well. Is it that hard to believe that maybe a single chip for the ps5 and then maybe 2 or 4 connected through infinity fabric for high end desktop similar to threadripper?

idk, i’m excited for 2020-21 when it comes to GPUs. Intel entering the discrete market, probably AMD’s next go in high end discrete graphics, probably Nvidia releasing a follow up to the 20 series that isn’t so overpriced. Hopefully the market will become much more competitive, and things being made at 7nm by then, probably leading to some pretty significant improvements in performance.

Consoles and PCs are vastly different concerning the surrounding hardware. They are more thick laptops than towers.
I don´t doubt there is some higher end Polaris in the works (or maybe we got it wrong and it is actually triple Polaris 10 for Servers?), but October as a launch date seems rather odd to me.

Edit: Traditionally, we see a bunch of leeks in the weeks and days before product launches. And as of right now, we barely got enough to keep WCCF going.

yeah, i would not expect a high end polaris gpu this year. I just read your statement as saying there will probably never be a high end polaris GPU, that the architecture is probably designed in such a way that it can’t be made into a high end product.

While that can be the case, I doubt AMD would paint themselfs into a corner like that.
Look at Zen beeing the “one shoe fits all”. And I would like to think they have worken MCM GPU silicon in some lab.
Polaris 30 would be good to get them into reviews again. RX580s and RX Vegas are cheap and available, but people have forgotten they exist.

I suspect that Polaris on TSMC process (and i’m guessing that’s what will be happening now AMD no longer have mandatory ties to GloFo from memory?) will be an instant 15-20% performance improvement (via improved clocks).

And that would be very straightforward to achieve. I’d give credit to a polaris refresh this quarter, for sure.

What remains to be seen is if they’re gonna throw more shaders and ROPs at the same die space with the die shrink. That could make up some performance ground too, and still have clock increases.

I wish that was true.

I a mean you are correct but people don’t think like that. They just buy nVidia 1060’s and up.

AMD could release a an rtx crusher for cheaper than nvidia and still lose market share. It is a sad state of affairs.

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I wasn’t even referring to a die shrink.

I am confident that even existing 16 nm TSMC is THAT much better than 14nm GloFO. 7nm won’t come until navi i don’t think.

580 already runs really hot, I don’t see how they could eke out more performance without making the chip much larger (and thus more expensive) at current process. So if they toss out another Polaris at current process, it will be a straight-up rebrand. Which knowing AMD, is totally possible too.

The 290x was hot, because the cooler was shit and the fan small.
The RX 580 runs hot because the fans don´t spin up.

I have a Sapphire R9 Fury. Card sits at 70°C and the fans are at 27% (auto). I get the fan stop during idle, but get those fans to 40% and the card maxes out at 55°C

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