Is AMD releasing a 1050 competitor?

Hot on the heels of news that Nvidia is releasing its sub-£150 GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti GPUs, AMD is apparently ready to fire back in this never-ending race to the bottom.

According to Videocardz, AMD is preparing its own budget card to sit between the RX 460 and RX 470, a new Polaris 10 ‘Ellesmere’ based SKU, referred to either as the ‘RX 465’ or the ‘RX 470 SE’.

The SKU is a cut down verion of Polaris 10, in an effort to lower power consumption below the 100W mark, to around 90W.

The chip apparently features 1,792 stream processors across 28 Graphics CoreNext compute units (CUs), out of the 36 CUs physically present on the chip. The RX 470 features 32 CUs, while the RX 480 maxes out all available CUs. The memory bus will remain untouched, featuring 4GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. It will go up to 7.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) and and process 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth – double that of the GTX 1050 series. There are also rumours that AMD is set to release another SKU with 1,536 stream processors (24/36 CUs enabled), which AMD could position against the GTX 1050 (non-Ti).

According to 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme and 3DMark Time Spy scores posted by a ChipHell Forums user with access to a sample, the 1,792-SP SKU is about 11 per cent slower than the RX 470 4 GB in Fire Strike Extreme, and about 11.7 per cent slower at Time Spy.

If it can outperform the GTX 1050 Ti, AMD could find itself dominating the space for budget GPUs with a solid range of 460, 470 and 480 cards.