The AMD RX460 has officially been announced in India, but the pricing makes little sense

AMD has announced the availability and pricing for the AMD Radeon RX460 in India. The card is aimed squarely at mid-range systems and, as AMD puts it, it’s been “engineered from the ground up for eSports gamers who demand pristine HD gaming.” Why an “eSports gamer” would specifically go for an AMD RX460 over anything else is beyond us, but let’s just get to the specs first.

AMD desperately needs a win here. Their promise with the RX 4XX series was budget VR gaming and finally, the offering of a worthy competitor to Nvidia. Strangely enough, their pricing in India says otherwise. As you can see from the table, the RX460 is a considerable step down from the RX470 and RX480. Given the pricing, this makes no sense whatsoever. The RX470 offers more than double the stream processors (2048 vs 896) and texture units (128 vs 56), double the ROPs (32 vs 16), double the memory bandwidth (256-bit vs 128-bit) and almost double the transistor count (5.7B vs 3B). All of this for just Rs 2,500 more than the asking price of the RX460. What’s the asking price for the RX460? Rs 11,990 for the 2GB model and Rs 13,490 for the 4GB model. The official price of the card is $109 or around Rs 7,300. That’s a drastic difference. Without even testing the card, we can tell you right now that the RX470 is a better deal. The sheer power difference between the two cards is staggering. The RX470 offers 4.9TFLOPS to the RX460’s 2.2TFLOPS, and this for a price difference of 18 percent. If the two cards sold at their official prices, the RX460 would have made for an amazing budget contender. The only factor in favour of the RX460 is the fact that it’s a sub-75 Watt card that doesn’t require an external power connector. What is AMD thinking? In the off-chance that you’re actually interested in the card, the 2GB model of the RX460 will be available from 15 August onwards and the 4GB model will be available in September.