Confirming what was rumoured lately, AMD corporate vice president Roy Taylor has said both Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 will be affordable GPUs aimed at the mainstream market. Taylor cites the Radeon R9 290 and the GeForce GTX 970 as being near to the sweet spot for gamers, offering great performance for a reasonable price, but much can still be done to expand the reach of gaming graphics cards.

“The reason Polaris is a big deal, is because I believe we will be able to grow that total addressable market significantly,” said Taylor. “If you look at the total install base of a Radeon 290, or a GTX 970, or above, it’s 7.5 million units. But the issue is that if a publisher wants to sell a £40/$50 game, that’s not a big enough market to justify that yet.”

He goes on to say that it’s down to the GPU manufacturers to “prime the pumps”, offering great value hardware which drives users to PC gaming. Everything we’re hearing about Polaris essentially points to great performance for a cheaper price, although we’re unlikely to see anything push the boundaries of performance until Vega arrives.

For those seeking the best of the best, Taylor believes Nvidia is going to be targeting the high-end with Pascal, estimating price points of between $600-$1000. He believes this isn’t beneficial to growing the PC gaming market, saying “We're going on the record right now to say Polaris will expand the total addressable market.”

Relatively high performing GPUs for a cheap price looks to be bang on the money, and it’s appearing increasingly likely that the higher-end Polaris 10 graphics cards (such as the R9 490 & 490X) are going to hit that $300-400 sweet spot.

What’s your plans then, are you going to go affordable with AMD Polaris? Or do all out and pick up a Pascal graphics card? Share your plans below!