AMD Radeon RX 490 release date, rumors: RX 490 coming before the year ends?

Charmaine Montes Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could be releasing another graphics card before the year ends. Rumored to be called the Radeon RX 490, the product is said to have a 2016 launch date.

AMD already released a couple of Polaris-built graphics processing units earlier this year but it seems like the company is not done yet as reports said the company is currently working on a rumored 4K-based graphic card. However, no official announcement regarding its release has been made.

Reports said that onlookers only relied on the fact that the AMD Radeon RX 490 was spotted earlier on the company's official website. It was also found in Sapphire's website and was even said to be part of a promotion that would end on Dec. 31, 2016. Fans were baffled by the leaked information but since AMD has not yet said anything, this remains as a rumor.

There is still a chance that it will hit shelves sometime in 2017 especially since the graphics card is said to potentially be powered by AMD's Vega 10 graphics processing unit (GPU). Apparently, the GPU isn't out yet and it's expected to be available in 2017 as well.

But if the Radeon RX 490 will not feature the next generation Vega 10 architecture, it could be coming with a dual-GPU Polaris-based Radeon graphics chip. It's noted though that the former is a more plausible GPU choice for the purported graphics card because the Vega 10 can make it more powerful compared to its predecessors. It's also going to be a great contender against the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti which is set to be released in early 2017.

Other rumors also said that the Radeon RX 490 will be packed with 9,830 GFLOPS of computing power paired with a base clock of 1200 MHz. Its memory size could be 8196 MB HBM2 while its memory bus width is 4096-bit and its memory bandwidth 716.8 GB/s. It's also said that the graphics card will support VR gaming.

None of the details released are confirmed or official though so it's best to take the reports with a grain of salt.