Radeon RX 460

The Radeon RX 460, like its older relative, has all the advantages of the fourth generation GCN architecture, among which an important place is color compression with a ratio of up to 8:1, which allows more efficient use of RAM bus bandwidth. In addition, in Polaris 11 - compared to Bonaire - the second level cache was doubled (from 512 KB to 1 MB).

Among other optimizations of the internal structure GPU, introduced in GCN 1.4, we note the more efficient operation of the geometry engine, capable of cutting off zero-size polygons or those that do not have pixels in the projection at early stages of the pipeline. The work of Compute Units has also been tuned in order to increase their specific performance.

The Polaris 11 chip features a seven-scheduler configuration, first introduced in GPU Tonga and Fiji: Graphics Command Processor for rendering commands, four ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine) for non-graphics calculations and two more HWS (Hardware Schedulers) blocks for calculation commands - they have the ability to interrupt the chain of instruction execution to switch to a higher-priority task.
In terms of functionality, Polaris's innovations include support for half-bit number formats — int16 and FP16 — used in computational tasks that do not require more precise representation (such as machine learning). Dedicated codec GPU allows hardware encoding and decoding of video in HEVC Main 10 and VP9 profiles with resolutions up to 4K.

Polaris 11 contains 16 Compute Units, in the Radeon RX 460 the manufacturer disabled two of them, which as a result equalized the video card in terms of the number of shader ALUs and texture units with the fully functional Bonaire implementation - Radeon R7 260X. However, the RX 460 has a number of advantages in the form of an increased frequency of the GPU (1090–1200 MHz) and RAM (7 GHz effective frequency), as well as the official ability to equip the video card with 4 GB of memory. Let's remember: Radeon R7 260/260X/360 were limited to a maximum capacity of 2 GB.

As a result, the RX 460 is only 9% better than the R7 260X in theoretical FP32 computing power. However, in games the difference will probably be greater due to optimizations of the GCN microarchitecture. And compared to the Radeon R7 360, built on a “cut down” GPU Bonaire, the RX 460 offers 33% higher theoretical performance.

The Radeon RX 460's TDP is less than 75 W, which isn't particularly impressive, but it's a significant improvement over the R7 260X and R7 360 (115 and 110 W, respectively). This allows RX 460 video cards to do without an additional power connector, using only the power lines in the PCI-Express slot.

Radeon RX 460 Specifications

RX 460 video cards use only 8 PCI-Express version 3.0 lanes for data transfer. The RX 460 has become a mainstream affordable product with sufficient performance for undemanding multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, DOTA 2 and others.