The upcoming AMD Radeon RX 490 is said to be Vega-based. (Photo : YouTube/AdoredTV)
AMD has confirmed the 2017 arrival of its Vega 11 and Vega 10 graphics card series, the latter likely bannered by the rumored Radeon RX 500 GPUs. As earlier reported, first glimpse of the next-gen monster cards will be at the Las Vegas CES 2017 that will kick off January 5.
AMD has set up a dedicated website for the Vega 10 and 11 push plus a short YouTube clip (can be viewed below) to further support the tease campaign, according to WCCFTech. As the ve.ga site indicated, the countdown has commenced and will end in three days, essentially confirming of a giant confirmation to happen in the fifth day of January.
Per the known details so far, AMD intends to unpack the Radeon RX 500 series that will replace the current RX 400 flagship cards. RX 500 is seen as part of the Vega 10 GPU family and its upcoming introduction has effectively quashed the rumors that AMD will match its rival NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 with the Radeon RX 490 card.
Yet the RX 490 not becoming a reality after all seems not a total disappointment since the RX 500 series promise of better specs, features and capabilities. For starters, the family of cards is thought to come out in both HBM2 and GDDR5/X editions, somehow hinting of significantly enhanced memory bandwidth speed.
According to WCCFTech, it's highly likely that one flagship RX 500 card will boast of the Instinct MI25 Accelerator that hints of up to 12.5TFLOPs peak computing performance in single precision mode or 6.25TFLOPs a 2:1 ratio of single- to double-precision, which the report said was a GPU prowess first showcased with the GTX 1080.
Benchmark leaks have indicated too that there will be 16GB and 8GB RX 500 variants both on the HBM2 interface, the former to pack a memory bandwidth of 512GBPS. "This would mean we are either looking at a 2048-bit memory bus (2 HBM2 stacks) at 1000 MHz or a 4096-bit memory bus (4 HBM2 stacks) at 500 MHz," WCCFTech said on its report.
The same benchmark results also suggested that the RX 500 has the GPU chops to render in 4K display resolution and fully support artificial intelligence or AI gaming, potentially bringing the card in parity with GTX 1080 or even the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti that NVIDIA is expected too to reveal in the coming days via the CES 2017.
In terms of pricing, the Radeon RX 500 is rumored to retail with a sticker price close or even lower to that of the GTX 1080, which has an SRP of $600 per unit. And following the CES 2017 revelation in Las Vegas, the RX 500 Vega 10 GPU is set to hit the market alongside the Vega 11 cards, the specifications of which remain unknown.
