These cards were the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm[8] FinFET manufacturing process, developed by Samsung Electronics and licensed to GlobalFoundries.

Polaris implements the 4th generation of the Graphics Core Next instruction set, and shares commonalities with the previous GCN microarchitectures.

[9] OpenCL allows use of GPUs for highly parallel numeric computation accelerates many scientific software packages against CPU up to factor 10 or 100 and more.

Vulkan 1.2 requires GCN 2nd gen or higher with the Adrenalin 20.1 and Linux Mesa 20.0 drivers and newer.

It includes new hardware schedulers,[11] a new primitive discard accelerator,[12] a new display controller,[13] and an updated UVD that can decode HEVC at 4K resolutions at 60 frames per second with 10 bits per color channel.

Despite this, the Polaris 10 chip is anticipated to run the latest DirectX 12 games "at a resolution of 1440p with a stable 60 frames per second.

[24] Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective did a follow-up test after other reports and found out his review sample takes 80-84 watts from the motherboard at stock speed, and that the other PCI Express slots' 12 volt power supply pins were supplying only 11.5 volts during load on his Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme motherboard.

[25] He was not concerned about the voltage droop due to the specification's 8% voltage tolerance, but did note of possible problems in systems where multiple overclocked RX 480 cards are running in quad CrossFire, or in motherboards that are not designed to withstand high currents, such as budget and older models.

[26] The amount of power drawn from on the connector is dependent on a newly introduced "compatibility mode" in the driver.