AMD reportedly hosted an event designed to showcase its upcoming Polaris GPUs and the Radeon Pro Duo to journalists behind closed doors in Taiwan recently, ahead of an expected official unveiling in May. The big noise coming out of the event is that the switch to the 14nm FinFET fabrication process means the Polaris 10 GPU performs extremely close to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but for a drastically cheaper price point.

As we’ve detailed before, the process shrink means improvements to efficiency and transistor density, resulting in a bump in performance. That bump looks to be a hefty one as well, if the Polaris 10 is to match the GTX 980 Ti.

The Polaris 10 GPU is the successor to the 300-series, which AMD views as its mainstream range. This means Polaris 10 is not the next Fury and Fury X, but rather a 300 series successor, which is up to and including the R9 390X. That equates to the eventual Polaris 10 powered Radeon R9 490X being capable of GTX 980 Ti performance for a price tag in the region of $300-400.

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The Polaris 10 GPU itself has a maximum TDP of 175W, but AMD claims it will generally consume far less than that. Early benchmarks have the Polaris 10 scoring in the region of 4000 points in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, which puts it firmly in the ballpark of the Fury X and the 980 Ti. If AMD can hit the rumoured $300 price point with such a graphics card then it could have an absolute monster on its hands.

Should these performance benchmarks ring true, will it be upgrade time for you when Polaris rolls around? Or are you waiting to see what the next-gen Vega GPUs have in store?