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AMD confirms Polaris for the mid-year

by on04 March 2016


Fury X2 on track


AMD held a Q&A with Reddit users and confirmed that its Polaris GPU is on track for the middle of the year and the Fury X2 will be appearing.

Hexus went through the transcript and sorted out the best bits. Answers were supplied an AMD Technical Marketing executive ‘AMD_Robert,’ although a couple were answered by the AMD Gaming Community Manager ‘AMD-DOWNL1NK.’

AMD_Robert said that he couldn't answer all the Polaris architecture/SKU/pricing questions because everything was locked down with strict NDAs. He did say that AMD’s Vulkan drivers will only run on the amdgpu kernel driver.

“We have no plans, on Linux, to support Vulkan on any other driver stack. I do not know the current roadmap for our Linux drivers." He added that the Linux driver will be released soon “We're not talking months".

On Fury X2 AMD-Robert said that the original Q4 2015 release schedule has been shifted "to better align with the market". At the originally planned launch time working samples were sent to partners who have provided very positive feedback.

He also said that Polaris products are 14nm GlobalFoundries made and old products will be replaced "while supplies last.”
Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 will launch with DP1.3 spec connections. There will be high end gaming laptops with Polaris GPUs coming up for those who like powerful mobile computing.

AMD is sticking to its 2x performance per watt jump over existing hardware. HDR displays are expected to arrive in force in H2 2016 but it will be up to games developers to show an interest and build in such colour capabilities.

AMD said it was pleased that it has "lead in performance on every DX12 app/test so far" however he did warn that older AMD cards and next gen APIs might will never be totally % compliant with everything DX12 or Vulkan have to offer.

Asked by one user, a Radeon 7970 was "compatible with the vast majority of the core specification," and should bring performance and IQ benefits.

Last modified on 04 March 2016
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