Fans of Team Red will be pleased to learn that, at least according to the rumour mill, we’ll see the launch of the Radeon R9 490 and R9 490X graphics cards in just over a couple of months.
As VideoCardz notes, according to some generally reliable rumour peddlers over at the Korean site Hardware Battle, AMD plans to unleash new Polaris GPUs built on 16nm FinFET tech. Rumors suggest an announcement at the end of June with a possible initial unveiling at Computex 2016.
It’s also suggested that the Radeon R9 490/490X duo will be based on Polaris 10 technology rather than Fiji. The R9 480 could also potentially stick with Fiji as well, if the latter is slower than Polaris 10. Based on the existing cards, it’s likely these AMD components will be pitched up against Nvidia’s future GeForce GTX 1070/1080.
Others across the net have suggested, however, that the R9 490 series won’t reach this sort of performance level, and as the focus of Polaris is efficiency, they could be right – but all of this is very much speculation right now. The good news is that it won’t be too long before we know the facts of the matter, as Computex is next month (it kicks off on the final day of May).
Power (efficiency) to the people
Polaris is ushering in what AMD describes as a ‘generational jump’ in terms of power efficiency. Of course that will be even more exciting for mobile gaming, as laptop GPUs will benefit the most in terms of being able to cram more powerful discrete solutions into notebooks.
AMD recently revealed its Radeon Pro Duo video cards which have dual GPUs for some truly serious pixel-shifting power, aimed at enthusiasts and VR content creators, but the price is going to tip north of a grand (the card will retail at $1,499 in the US, which is around £1,060, or AU$1,980).
Source: techradar.com