The AMD Radeon RX 490 by American semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices is one of the highly anticipated video cards for 2017, and a benchmark result was spotted in the wild. The graphics processing unit appears to be much faster than the company's own Radeon RX 480 but its speed is close to the figures tossed out by its competitor, the NVIDIA GTX 1080.
Eagle-eyed tech enthusiasts have discovered a listing on Prisguide that displays the alleged video graphics card. Although it is a Norwegian site, it can easily be understood that the posting only shows basic information about the GPU, which include support for CrossFire mode and the use of a PCI Express 3.0 bus. It is also reportedly designed for DirectX 12.
It is believed that the Radeon RX 490 is a high-end card that will be able to produce 4K resolution and will be powerful enough to drive those resource-hugger virtual reality headsets. It is also speculated that the upcoming card will be based on the newly developed Vega architecture that will have a bus width that is more than 256 bits, an HBM2 memory, and at least 12 TFLOPS computing power.
Meanwhile, according to WCCFTech, an unknown video card device ID was discovered on the "Ashes of the Singularity" video game benchmark page and is believed to have come from the alleged AMD video graphics card. The benchmark database is home to several performance results of video cards before being launched in the market, and it includes the current RX 480 and the GTX 1080.
The card in question shows an ID 687F:C1 that offers a result under the Standard 1080P DX12 test. It gained 8,400 points and was given a 131st position. The entry was said to have been deleted afterwards but its test scores were reportedly comparably close to those of NVIDIA's high-end gaming card. There is no other AMD Radeon 400 series GPU that comes close to the score generated by the GTX 1080; thus, the unnamed entry is believed to be the next-generation card.
AMD also posted on its website that a media event will happen at 4 p.m. ET Dec. 13 in Austin, Texas and is dubbed as "New Horizon." The announcement shows that it will feature the new Zen CPU. Tech enthusiasts believe that the event could also feature the new video graphics card, although it is expected to be available by mid-2017.
The said event is also scheduled ahead of Intel's desktop CPU launch and fans are simply waiting for the showdown to unfold.