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AMD Radeon Pro 460

AMD Radeon Pro 460: A Professional Tool in an Outdated Form Factor

Relevance as of April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon Pro 460 is a discrete graphics card released in 2016 for mobile workstations, including some models of MacBook Pro. Despite its age, it still finds applications in niche solutions. In 2025, its relevance for gaming approaches zero, but it retains value for certain professional tasks. Let's examine who might find this GPU useful today.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Polaris Architecture: A Modest Foundation

The Radeon Pro 460 is built on the Polaris architecture (14 nm), which focuses on energy efficiency. Unlike modern AMD RDNA 3 or NVIDIA Ada Lovelace, Polaris does not support hardware ray tracing or AI acceleration.

Unique Features

- AMD FidelityFX: A post-processing suite (contrast sharpening, upscaling), but 2025 versions (e.g., FSR 3.0) are incompatible.

- Professional Drivers: Optimized for CAD, rendering, and scientific packages.

- FreeSync: Support for adaptive synchronization.

What’s Missing:

- Hardware ray tracing (no RTX equivalent).

- AI for upscaling (DLSS or FSR 3.0).

2. Memory: Modest Specs

- Type and Capacity: 4 GB GDDR5 with a 256-bit bus.

- Bandwidth: 81.6 GB/s.

For tasks in 2025, this is insufficient: even basic neural network models require at least 8 GB of VRAM. However, for working with 2D graphics or older 3D projects, the memory is adequate.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia for the Past

The Radeon Pro 460 was not designed for gaming, but between 2016 and 2020, it handled projects like Overwatch or CS:GO. In 2025, its capabilities look like this:

- 1080p / Low Settings:

- Fortnite: 35-45 FPS (without FSR).

- Apex Legends: 25-30 FPS.

- Modern AAA Games: Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield — less than 20 FPS even on the lowest settings.

Ray Tracing: Not supported.

Advice: Consider this card only for indie games or retro projects.

4. Professional Tasks: Narrow Specialization

Video Editing

- Premiere Pro: Smooth rendering in 1080p, but 4K will cause lags.

- DaVinci Resolve: Accelerated color correction via OpenCL.

3D Modeling

- Blender / Maya: Average performance in polygon modeling. GPU rendering (Cycles) will take 3-4 times longer compared to modern cards.

Scientific Calculations

- OpenCL: Suitable for simple simulations (physics, bioinformatics), but lags behind NVIDIA CUDA in speed.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

- TDP: 35 watts — one of its main advantages.

- Cooling: Passive or compact cooler.

- Case Recommendations: Suitable for small form factor PCs with proper ventilation.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M (2020)

- Pros: RDNA, 8 GB GDDR6, supports FSR 2.0.

- Cons: Higher price ($300+).

NVIDIA Quadro T1000 (2020)

- Pros: CUDA cores, better for rendering.

- Cons: TDP 50 watts, more expensive ($350+).

Conclusion: The Pro 460 falls behind even models from 2020 but is cheaper (from $150 for new leftovers).

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: A 300-watt supply is sufficient.

- Compatibility:

- macOS: Best optimization (older MacBook Pro models).

- Windows / Linux: Specific drivers are required.

- Drivers: Use the "Pro" branch for stability in professional tasks.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Stability in professional applications.

- Affordable price for basic tasks.

Cons:

- Outdated architecture.

- Insufficient VRAM for modern projects.

- Lack of support for new technologies (ray tracing, AI).

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the Radeon Pro 460 For?

This graphics card is suitable for:

1. Owners of older MacBook Pros who need an upgrade without system replacement.

2. Professionals working with 2D graphics or light 3D models.

3. Enthusiasts building budget PCs for office tasks.

Do not buy the Radeon Pro 460 if:

- You need to play modern games.

- You work with 4K video or neural networks.

In 2025, this is a specialized tool, not a universal solution. Its price is justified only in exceptional scenarios.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

October 2016

Model Name

Radeon Pro 460

Generation

Radeon Pro Mac

Base Clock

850MHz

Boost Clock

907MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x8

Transistors

3,000 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

GlobalFoundries

Process Size

14 nm

Architecture

GCN 4.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1270MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

81.28 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

14.51 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

58.05 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

1.858 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

116.1 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.821 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1024

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

35W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.2

OpenCL Version

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_0)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.4

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.821 TFLOPS

OpenCL

Score

14494

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon Pro WX 4150 Mobile

1.925 +5.7%

GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile

1.873 +2.9%

Radeon Pro 460

1.821

Radeon Vega 10 Mobile

1.756 -3.6%

Radeon HD 8950M

1.684 -7.5%

OpenCL

Radeon RX 6700S

62821 +333.4%

Radeon Pro 5300

38843 +168%

Radeon R9 M290X

21442 +47.9%

Radeon Pro 460

14494

Radeon HD 5750

884 -93.9%