Will AMD jump straight to the Radeon RX 500 graphics card series or the long-rumored RX 490 is still a go and likely to appear soon following the confirmation from AMD CEO Lisa Su that release date of the Vega GPUs will happen as early as April 2017?
Su, according to Forbes, has announced that after the AMD Ryzen CPUs market debut in March the spotlight will be next trained on the Vega 10 and 11 GPUs. The company big boss confirmed that Polaris will be bumped off soon as AMD's flagship graphics architecture.
But while it was confirmed that Vega is AMD's new GPU boss, the actual label of the next-generation graphics engine from the giant chipmaker remains a mystery. As noted by Forbes on its report, rumors have been circulating that from the RX 480 the next Radeon card will jump straight to RX 500 so it's unlikely that the RX 490 will still see the light of the day.
Speculations are rife too that AMD has opted to rebrand the RX 490 and sell as the card as the RX 590 but debates remain raging if the product will be a Polaris in dual-GPU configuration or the first of the Vega cards to come out.
Thankfully, a slip recently made by Fallout 4 maker Bethesda appears to offer some clues on the RX 490. The game studio has already revealed its plan of releasing the same title for PC gamers in High Resolution Texture Pack, according to DSO Gaming, and recently listed the hardware requirements for optimal enjoyment.
For the Fallout 4 release, Bethesda said Windows 7 and later versions will be required, and the CPU has to be Intel Core i7-5820K or preferably of higher configuration. The RAM support should be no less than 8GB.
But the surprise came with the GPU necessities, which Bethesda said has to be NVIDIA's GTX 1080 or the Radeon RX 490 (not RX 480) from AMD. Both cards will boast of 8GB memory chip.
Of course, the listing was later edited but instead of altering the RX 490 with RX 480 Bethesda simply deleted the AMD card. However, the correction only further fired up the rumors that the Fallout 4 specs requirements will again be revised with the RX 490 to be included anew, and that is when AMD is ready to share more concrete details on the card.
If the rumors are correct, AMD will replace the RX 480 with the Radeon RX 490 (and not the RX 590) that will directly tussle with NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and the upcoming GTX 1080 Ti. Release date of the card could be as early as April 2017, as hinted by AMD's Lisa Su.