AMD Radeon RX 480 with Polaris architecture while the rumored Radeon RX 490 is expected to have Vega architecture (Photo : YouTube/ DigitalFoundry)
The AMD Radeon RX 490 is practically confirmed for a first quarter of 2017 release date thanks to a freshly-leaked MacOS Sierra driver script code that also indicated the flagship graphics card is a Vega 10 GPU. Additionally, the leaked details pointed to AMD's plan of soon deploying the RX 475 and RX 485.
The two cards, according to WCCFTech, will run on the upcoming Polaris 10 XT2 GPU that the leaked MacOS driver also revealed. If the new information will prove correct, the report said that Polaris 10 XT2 will be the power behind the Radeon 400 or Radeon 500 series. For the 400 series, AMD has all but confirmed the RX 475 and 485 that likely will be the mid-range card bets of AMD.
The Polaris 10 XT2 is obviously a step up from Polaris 10 and will likely feature "better clock speeds and better efficiency," WCCFTech said on its report.
The spotted OS driver code also revealed the yet unseen Polaris 12 GPU family, which the report said is likely geared for the mainstream market. The card in this series is not expected to pack more power than the Polaris 10 and 11, indicating that the platform will fire up the more affordable segment of the upcoming AMD cards.
Unsurprisingly, the leaked MacOS driver details also carried a string of code that referred to the Vega 10 GPU, somehow lending support to the growing belief that the flagship Radeon RX 490 is part of the banner AMD platform.
The report said that the RX 490 on Vega 10 promises to be a monster 14nm FinFET GPU. "We now know that Vega 10 can feature up to 4096 stream processors based on a new GCN uARCH (GFX9). The chip has as much as 24 TFLOPs of half-precision and 12 TFLOPs of single precision compute performance. The chip also features up to 16 GB of HBM2 that is clocked to operate at 512 GB/s. The cards based on this chip are rated with 225W TDP," WCCFTech revealed.
The Radeon RX 490 is also tipped to fully support 4K resolution and virtual reality or VR gaming features. And as AMD's direct answer to the NVIDIA flagship card, the RX 490 is seen as the upcoming rival of the GeForce GTX 1080 card. When it hits the market, the high-end AMD card is thought to sell a bit a lower than the GTX 1080, which retails for $600 a pop.
WCCFTech said AMD is likely to introduce the Radeon RX 490 with the Zen-based Summit Ridge processors on December 13 but the actual release date is not expected to happen until the early months of 2017, as mentioned above.
