I watched the event live and I would sum it up as boring and awkward in my opinion.
Raja kicks off the event by talking vaguely about VR, then VR applications, then Vulkan, then back to VR, then games in general, PC gamers, back to VR, then finally Polaris. He talks a bit more about nothing really, 2.5x efficiency, bringing their premium cooler from their Fiji cards to the mainstream bla bla and then he finally announces the RX 480. He picks up the card from the table behind him and he holds it up followed by 10 or so seconds of dead silence. After he reveals the $199 price you are reminded there is an audience when they cheer and clap. It was quite weird. I don't know how else to decribe it. Some people in the chat weren't very impressed by the presentation. I couldn't disagree.
The performance numbers AMD had consisted of two ($200) 480's against a $700 GTX 1080. Clearly AMD used the Founders Edition as comparison to amaze us even though we won't see Polaris on shelves before $599 AIB 1080's would be readily available. The game they used was AoTS (no surprise there), beating the 1080 by 3fps for "$200" less. They also showed the Doom demo hyping Vulkan, but never giving any other comparison to any other cards including their own. And no single GPU numbers or comparisons. This all took about 15 minutes while Raja stuttered and paused numerous times throughout. I was glad when it was over.
Lisa Su comes on stage and talks about the AM4 platform, Summit Ridge everywhere bla bla...
Then came Zen. Mrs. Su showed a chip she said was Zen. She repeated what was on the slides we've all seen about the 40% improvement bla bla bla. I think she said something about it being in the early stages of something, but assured everyone that Zen was "really good". At least she didn't call it an "Overclockers Dream". She ended by giving the fans "one last view of Zen".
Oh yea, she did mention a $300 Polaris GPU, meaning Raja showed us the $200 version - I guess.
All said and done the whole presentation was quite boring and looked thrown together at the last minute to be honest. Maybe they should of delayed their party until after the presentation.
I cannot wait until the 29th for the full monty. I also can't wait to see what nVIDIA does with the GTX 1060 and GTX 1050. Anything could happen in 29 days.
*Edited for spelling
AMD may have used best case scenarios but so did Nvidia to an even larger extent. I guess it would have been more exciting if they had claimed 2.5x performance..........................................(in VR) like Nvidia had.
It honestly sounds like you had no genuine interest in it if you are inserting "blaa blaa blaa". I believe that's a mannerism, not actually what happened. What you really wanted to say was that AMD's presentation was more straightforward and not a bro-fest like Nvidia press events.
I, and I suspect many others, was under the impression the 1080 would be "twice the performance of Titan X for less TDP." After all, they kept chanting that tag line over, and over, and over...
