It’s been a while since AMD released a new mobile GPU, and we are not talking re-brands here with their latest Radeon R9 M400 series of GPUs based on the older architecture.

From the slides shared by AMD to us, we can conclude that they are targeting the mobile gaming market with the Polaris GPUs. AMD is on point here, as the Polaris architecture brings great performance-per-watt with a matching price point, so notebooks could really use a new graphics architecture too without the need to go for a more expensive approach. The Z-height of the Polaris chips are said to be optimized for notebooks, and are able to deliver console like performance. That’s a atatement from AMD, and we got some benchmarks from the slides to confirm that one up.

AMD Polaris Benchmarks News (4)

As for the benchmarks, we got loads of them from AMD footnotes on the shared slide. Benchmarks includes performance figures for the notebook part Polaris 11, with the designation RX 480M, compared to the R9 M280X. We also got loads of benchmarks for the desktop part Polaris 10, designated as the RX 470, being compared to the R9 270X.

AMD Polaris Benchmarks News (1)

The RX 470 appears to be on the league of the reference R9 290, when it comes to the 3DMARK Fire Strike benchmarks alone, but Intel’s Core i7 5960X is definitely a contributing factor here so we cannot be certain about the card’s true place at the benchmarks using mainstream CPUs. The score might be also from the graphics score of the benchmark, so we want you to take these benchmarks with a little grain of salt. Based on the Ashes of Singularity, and OVERWATCH at 1080P, the RX 470 is more than 1.5x – 1.6x faster than the R9 270X. Rest assured, things are looking great for the Polaris 10 desktop part. The RX 480M on the other hand appears to feature a performance similar to the R7 360, or the HD 7850.

AMD Polaris Benchmarks News (3)

According to AMD, the performance-per-watt figures of both parts are 2.8x better than that of their older counterparts. With that said, the RX 470 features a 110W total power while the R9 270X features a 180W disadvantage. The most promising part, the RX 480M, features a 35W board power, while the R9 M280X features an 82W power as a disadvantage.

AMD Polaris Benchmarks News (2)

AMD’s Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs are promising indeed, and we cannot wait to find out more about them for the weeks to come.

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