AMD announces $199 VR ready graphics card

VR-friendly specs for just $199 – that’s the selling point of AMD’s latest GPU.

Until now gamers have faced the prospect of at least an Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 if they want to make the jump to VR. They retail for north of 250. While many VR games will run perfectly on slightly older cards, a 970/290 or above is required to guaranteed universal functionality.

AMD hopes to lower that barrier to entry with the Radeon RX480. The card packs 5 teraflops of compute performance, falling just shy of the 6 teraflops boasted by Nvidia’s new 250+ GTX 1070. The GTX 1080, which will likely cost 500 or so, packs 9 teraflops.

Nonetheless, at just $199, the RX480 should appeal to a very wide audience. It’s built on AMD’s new Polaris architecture and will come in both 4GB and 8GB configurations, the latter of which will presumably cost more.

The strategy seems to be that AMD is happy for Nvidia to have the high-end market, but it wants to budget market all to itself.

The RX480 has a release date of June 29th.