AMD Radeon Polaris 20 XTX, Polaris 20 XL and Lexa Pro find out in drivers

Nvidia has offered a packed graphics card slot with Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan XP, but also variants of GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 with faster memory and higher bandwidth. Before the dust has even settled, it is AMD’s turn with the Radeon RX 500 series and not least the long-awaited RX Vega.

The new Radeon RX 500 series will be a refresh of last year’s RX 400 series, but with higher clock frequencies and four models instead of three. Now the graphics blog Videocardz has got its hands on the launch drivers, which confirm three models and their associated graphics circuits.

AMD Radeon RX 500 Series

According to previous information, Polaris 10 changes its name to Polaris 20, which is released in two variants – a full-scale with 2,304 stream processors named Polaris 20 XTX and a scaled-down with 2,048 stream processors codenamed Polaris 20 XL. The duo will be used in the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 respectively, which will succeed the RX 480 and RX 470.

Whether Polaris 20 only has a new name or other optimizations is not yet known. It is worth mentioning that at the announcement of Polaris, AMD had a representative Globalfoundries on stage, who promised the development potential of the architecture through optimizations in the 14-nanometer technology. It can therefore not be ruled out that the Polaris 20 is more energy efficient and can handle higher clock frequencies than its predecessor.

The third graphics card mentioned is the Radeon RX 550, which according to previous information to SweClockers is located between the Radeon RX 460 and R7 360. Interesting in this context is that the graphics circuit is called Lexa Pro, where the Pro suffix indicates that it is a scaled-down variant.

It has been rumored for months that AMD will have a smaller circuit underway called Polaris 12, which could thus have the alternative code name Lexa. What speaks for this is that the Polaris 11, which houses the Radeon RX 460 and is expected to be the upcoming RX 560, was called Baffin before AMD switched to its new name scheme.

The launch of the Radeon RX 500 series will begin with the RX 580 and RX 570 on April 18 and is expected to be followed by the RX 550 later in April, and the RX 560 during the month of May.