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2016 iMac Polaris Video Card info

Trebuin

Trebuin

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 3, 2008
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Central Cali
There's a lot of threads that have a wish list or a guess at what AMD card the new iMacs will get, the best guess being a AMD 460 which does not perform nearly as well as nVidia for good reasons. For that matter, the 395x might be the better option. But this is all cause by speculation. Here's what I have found:

Starting with this article by our own:
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/19/amd-polaris-2016-macs/
According to this, the Polaris 11 has a power range designed for notebooks. The Polaris 10 is designed for the iMac or greater. So what is the difference between the 10 and 11?

http://www.notebookcheck.net/uploads/tx_nbc2/AMD_Polaris_10_and_Polaris_11.jpg
This gives us only TFLOPS to compare by...not a very good indicator, but enough to give us a good starting point. The iMac should be on order of at least 5 TFLOPS.

Finally: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/...rce-gtx-1080-vs-gtx-1070-vs-gtx-1060-3640925/
This indicates we are looking somewhere between the 1060 and 1070 in performance. The RX 470 is first to meet the specs...it is a polaris 10. As nothing has been mentioned with a RX 490, I wouldn't hold my breath on that and would expect to see a performance between the nVidia 1060 and 1070.

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-10-graphics-card-leak/
http://wccftech.com/amd-rx-470-460-specs-performance-launch-dates/

The best of the benchmarks I can currently find:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
From the 395x, we should still see a considerable performance boost looking at the 1060...I just don't know how much over the 1060. Feel free to chime in thoughts.

Update:
AMD Has designated the 490 as built on Vega and won't come any sooner than this spring. That leaves us with the 470-480 and one X build which will either be 480x or 485x, if AMD designates any 485.

Regardless, we should see a performance increase on each model and a possibility of a power/temperature drop.
 
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Trebuin said:
I just hope that the release is in October and we see the 90-95x
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But where are the new CPUs? Everyone keeps talking about an October update but it's not going to happen without some change on the CPU front, surely.
 
The RX 480 and Nvidia 1060 are equal performers with a slight advantage to RX 480 in some games optimized for Direct X 12 or Vulcan such as Doom.

Custom overclocked 1060 cards will out perform RX 480.
 
if they do a redesign of the imac, they dont need new cpu. even so, to have latest ports usb-c/tb3 to have latest ddr4 ram, to have latest ssd, to have the latest dGPU it can be upgraded even if they take them 5 min on the stage
[doublepost=1473018643][/doublepost]i dont think RX 480 with 150W could fit into the imac,so the only solution is RX 470
 
There is support for the RX 470 cards in Sierra and a person in the Pro forum has one running. The RX 480 seems unstable and a few people have the RX 460 running OOB on hacks and Mac Pro.
 
Srb001 said:
if they do a redesign of the imac, they dont need new cpu. even so, to have latest ports usb-c/tb3 to have latest ddr4 ram, to have latest ssd, to have the latest dGPU it can be upgraded even if they take them 5 min on the stage
[doublepost=1473018643][/doublepost]i dont think RX 480 with 150W could fit into the imac,so the only solution is RX 470
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that they may use a lower power variant. The 395x is a high end ATI card, but is powered down. The Polaris was designed to reduce both power and heat but still allow an increase on the clocks. That being said, we may see the 470 or we might see an underpowered 480 or 490 to keep within power parameters. We likely won't know until Oct.
[doublepost=1473036064][/doublepost]
Crosscreek said:
There is support for the RX 470 cards in Sierra and a person in the Pro forum has one running. The RX 480 seems unstable and a few people have the RX 460 running OOB on hacks and Mac Pro.
Click to expand...
I'm interested in seeing how the 470 compares to the 395x.
 
Are the new Polaris cards gonna make a great difference from the current m390 m395 and m395X models?

I'm thinking of waiting for the new updated iMacs in October but would like to save some money on a refurb 2015 iMac but don't know if it's worth it.
 
In theory, double GPU performance. In reality, it has to deal with watt and temp limits which drives a down clock. The die shrink gives them double to 2.5x the performance per watt so the the 470 running at the watts it is is not comperable to the previous cards. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/2...s-2-5x-performance-per-watt-may-utilize-gddr5

I'm looking up temp info now. That will be the looting driver for the next cards. Yes, we could in theory get up to 250% performance, but where do we hit thermal limits?
 
AlexGraphicD said:
Wow 250% performance??!!
That's a lot of difference from the current models.
Click to expand...
Only in a perfect world, original stats said about 2x performance, not 2.5x and I think the current benchmarks are showing a little bit lower than 2x. FinFet opened the door to a huge performance boost. Now you know why so many are obsessed over Polaris 10 and nvidias 1k series
 
maflynn said:
No question for a desktop its fine but I was shocked to see it in a laptop
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i think it can fit in a big laptop like alienware...they are very thick and if im not mistaken they have 4 fans.Remember the upcoming Predator laptop has 2x Nvidia 1080
 
I would much prefer a spring release with Vega than a fall release of Polaris.
 
I've been using several Polaris 10 GPUs in the past 3 months in my Mac Pro towers. At the very least, new high-end iMacs will have an RX 470. RX 480 has a very good chance as well. The driver kext in macOS for these GPUs also contains a PCI ID for a GPU that should have higher specs than the RX 480 - that could be for the new Mac Pro though.
 
theitsage said:
I've been using several Polaris 10 GPUs in the past 3 months in my Mac Pro towers. At the very least, new high-end iMacs will have an RX 470. RX 480 has a very good chance as well. The driver kext in macOS for these GPUs also contains a PCI ID for a GPU that should have higher specs than the RX 480 - that could be for the new Mac Pro though.
Click to expand...
I have a 480 in my hack and the drivers seem a little lacking according to Geekbench GPU scores. Hope they can get them where they should be when the new Macs come out.
 
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