The last few years has seen the complete dominance of the PC gaming market by two names, Intel and NVIDIA. However, that may soon be changing. After a long period of hibernation, AMD is ready to come out of the shadows. With an extremely strong showing at this year’s Computex, AMD has set the PC gaming community abuzz with talks of their new Polaris line of GPUs and their Zen line-up of CPUs. Let’s start things off with Polaris. AMD’s latest GPU, the RX 480 comes with 4GB of VRAM, and is primarily targeted at VR Gaming, the latest trend to take the gaming market by storm. Till now systems, especially GPUs that were labeled VR Ready, have been extremely expensive and hence the realm of VR gaming has been an exclusive one, until now.
Coming in at only $199, AMD seeks to make VR a reality for most gamers, even if they are trying to build a rig on a shoestring budget, given of course the VR headsets themselves cost a bomb, the card from AMD will save you a few bucks indeed. If NVIDIA’s 16nm finFET process impressed you, AMD has gone one step further to introduce the first ever 14nm finFET process for their Polaris lineup! This means that the power consumption will be lower if not equal to the Pascal GPUs, a huge leap forward for AMD, who have been notorious to make cards that doubled as toasters in the past. As more and more details keep trickling in about the RX 480, the hype around this card keeps rising. If AMD plays their cards right and keeps on top of their extremely poor driver situation this time around, they may possibly have a product that rules the GPU market space for a while to come.
The details on the new Zen processor are still very slim. The one thing that AMD did stress on immensely during the reveal is that they have managed to greatly improve the per core performance of the new processor and hence we may finally see an AMD processor that gives Intel a run for its money. Additionally, with 8 physical cores with hyperthreading, the new ZEN processors are looking at eight physical cores and eight virtual cores, bringing it to a total of 16 cores, making it one hell of a multitasking beast great for those looking to game, stream and edit videos on their PC. Things are indeed looking great for Team Red right now, and given the main focus of the Indian market lies towards the budget end, the RX 480 may just prove to be the biggest hit from AMD till date.
