AMD RX 490 High-End 4K VR Graphics Card Inbound - Announcement and Release Expected in December

The RX 490 will target the 4K resolution. Epitome for illustrative purposes only.

We told y'all about the RX 490 approximately 4 months ago and how it is expected to launch past year end. Well, we accept just received further reports that the card will non only be announced in December, but will exist launched in December as well. In fact, it will be announced and launched on the very same day - then we are not looking at a soft or paper launch merely an actual release twenty-four hour period in the very nearly time to come. The carte du jour has been listed on AIB websites (and even AMD Official) for quite some while at present - so everything appears to exist prepare.

AMD's flagship GPU, the RX 490 will be announced and released on the aforementioned day in December

The RX 490 volition be AMD'due south 4K ready flagship that volition be taking on the GTX 1080 at a (probably) similar price point. It is going to be the crown jewel in AMD'due south RX lineup. The existing Polaris based lineup currently maxes out at the Polaris ten based RX 480 – which is roughly equivalent to the GTX 1060 in terms of graphical performance. According to AMD, Polaris x is the largest 14nm FinFET GPU available correct now and that raises interesting questions what we can expect from the RX 490.

Here are the things we know for certain, thank you to previous leaks and AMD'due south own documents:

It will target the 4K resolution and be the go-to graphics card for VR.
Information technology will take a passenger vehicle width greater than 256 bits.
It will be based on either a dual-GPU Polaris x blueprint or Vega 10.
Its going to be close to the price point of the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080.

AMD has been very tight lipped nigh the whole affair and has so far managed to avoid any leaks to the press. Since the expected announcement is so close anyways, we will find out the full details in December. We have already leaked a roadmap for AMD's upcoming GPUs for 2022 and 2022, and we can see that the visitor is taking its dual GPU designs very seriously indeed. If the card is indeed based on Polaris 10 then we are looking at a net full of 4609 stream processors - more enough to drive the 4K resolution.

Also go on in mind that since the card is specially focused towards VR, dual-GPU solutions have a unique advantage since they can dedicate one processor for each center. With advances in DirectX 12 API and Liquid VR (bank check out our exclusive interview on LiquidVR) making seamless execution of code on a dual GPU that much more easier for devs, it would be an ideal candidate for a truly "VR" focused GPU.

Nosotros have done a pretty thorough assay of all the hints previously and I am of the stance that the prove in favor of information technology being a dual GPU Polaris based affair is much greater than Vega coming early. That said, it is entirely possible that Vega has been fast-forwarded and is now ready to ship nether the RX 490 brand name. An overview of our original analysis is given beneath for those who desire to read it again.

Candidates for the RX 490: Vega 10 or Dual GPU?

The biggest hint to the nature of the RX 490 comes from these Zauba shipment manifests and one RRA certification that we spotted and analyzed a few months ago. These independent multiple variants, all of whom have been accounted for except one. This variant has not still been identified and is quite possibly the RX 490. Dubbed the "C99" variant hereon, all of the evidence on it point to the fact that we are looking at a dual GPU solution, probably i based on a full version of Polaris 10.

The simply other alternative was that the C99 variant is Vega 10 just in that location are some gaping holes in that theory that in my opinion put information technology at a much lower probability: 1) Vega x by recent reports was besides early on in the development phase to take made it out to the FOC testing phase (the shipment manifest was dated July 2022). In fact, if I were to offer some proof: the C99 board passed RRA certification on eighth April 2022 which was manner earlier AMD celebrated the Vega 10 GPU development milestone! 2) The nomenclature indicates a Polaris card.

So we know for a fact that the C99 board has nevertheless to exist accounted for. We know that its insurance value is equal to roughly double of the RX 480. We know that the classification indicates a Polaris GPU still Polaris 10 is the total fat chip (meaning in that location isn't a more powerful Polaris variant out there) and finally, that information technology passed RRA certification fashion earlier Vega ten was anywhere well-nigh completion.

In fact, the only way the RX 490 ends up being a Vega 10 GPU (assuming AMD did not fast-rail it) is if information technology arrives side by side year (which would hateful that the C99 board volition exist called something else), which doesn't brand a lot of sense because its (RX 490) listing has popped up in AMD partner AIB sites equally well.

As far every bit the pricing or the exact specification goes, we don't really have much information on that count. Keeping in heed AMD's strategy however, I doubt the card volition exist priced in the same range as the Radeon Duo Pro and I definitely would non be surprised if information technology is priced close to the GTX 1080. AMD has previously stated that 2 RX 480s tin vanquish a GTX 1080, and it is possible that this innocent enough statement was a big hint to what was coming sooner rather than afterward.

AMD Next Generation Vega 10, 11, xx and Dual GPU Graphics Card Rumored Lineup:

WCCFTech	Polaris 10	Vega 11	Vega 10	Vega x Dual GPU	Vega twenty
Year	2016	2017	2017	2017	2018
Process	14nm FinFET	14nm FinFET	14nm FinFET	14nm FinFET	7nm FinFET
Transistors In Billions	5.7	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
Stream Processors	2304	2304+ (est.)	4096	8192	4096
Clock Speed	1266 Mhz	TBA	1526 Mhz	1100 Mhz+ (est.)	1800 Mhz+ (est.)
Performance	5.eight TFLOPS	TBA	12.five TFLOPS	xix TFLOPS - 24 TFLOPs (est.)	15 TFLOPS+
TDP	150W	TBA	225W	300W	150-300W
Memory	8GB GDDR5	TBA	8GB/16GB HBM2	xvi-32GB HBM2	16-32GB HBM2
Memory Bus	256bit	TBA	2048-bit (2 Stacks)	4096-bit (2048-bit x2)	4096-chip (4 Stacks)
PCI Express	3.0	TBA	3.0	3.0	four.0
Bandwidth	256 GB/s	TBA	512 GB/s	one TB/southward	1 TB/s