Rumor: AMD Radeon 490 and 490X Polaris graphics cards launch end of June
In line with expectations today some new rumors surfaced on the mighty WWW. AMD possibly will have its first Polaris based series 400 Radeon graphics cards available in June, this would invoke the R9 490 and R9 490X. It is likely that these cards will be on display at Computex.
From what we heard, the Radeon R9 400 series will indeed get gddr5x memory, Micron (who delivers this new type of memory) already spread word that it is in volume production ever since srping. The AMD Radeon R9 490 and 490X graphics cards will be fitted with a Polaris 10-gpu, aimed at the high-end segment of the desktop market. Polaris 11 would be the GPU series specced for lower class graphics cards.
It was AMD themselves who in a recent roadmap was showing that polaris would be avilable this year during the Capsaicin-event at the Game Developer Conference.
Obviously AMD has not shared any specifications so all this remains unsubstantiatied including the memory type and naming. The roadmap also disclosed that you can expect HBM2 based product no sooner then early 2017.
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If we knew the wattage of the card we could come to a reasonable estimation of the performance. The claim is 2.5 times the performance per watt, so if the card is 200 W versus an old gen 200 W, it will be 2.5 times faster.
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That seems like wishful thinking, im sure Maxwell had similar efficiency claims.
I'm looking to build a bedroom PC in the next few months, might pick something up from this range, get me back checking out AMD stuff while still having the confort zone of the main Nvidia setup.
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That seems like wishful thinking, im sure Maxwell had similar efficiency claims.
I'm looking to build a bedroom PC in the next few months, might pick something up from this range, get me back checking out AMD stuff while still having the confort zone of the main Nvidia setup.
It doesn't seem that far fetched honestly. Nvidia is basically claiming double performance/watt. AMD was already, slightly behind in efficiency on Fiji (although arguably they are ahead in some of the newer titles). So they have more room to catch up.
I'm just not sure they are launching a 200w card. We know Polaris 11 is sub 100w and we know that Polaris 10 is capable of Hitman QHD @ 60fps. We also kind of maybe know they are only launching those two cards initially and we know that Nvidia isn't doing anything gaming wise with GP100 until next year.
Idk, I imagine Polaris 10 will be ~165w and be about 15-20% faster then a Fury X and I imagine that Nvidia will launch a similar card shortly after, probably the same chip that's going on the PX2.
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Micron has not said it's in volume production, they've said that they've started shipping samples to customers, and expect to start volume production during summer.
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Matches what RTG said in the reddit AMA. I wouldn't even call it a rumor at this point.
I expect Nvidia will have something of similar performance in the few months following that. I doubt any of the first wave cards will be much faster then what we have already -- just more efficient.