At the beginning of the summer of 2016, the architecture Polaris was launched, with which AMD focused on lower price ranges in order to take market share from Nvidia. Later in the spring, Vega arrives to take on the performance segment, but before that the company breathes new life into Polaris.
Now SweClockers can reveal that the Radeon RX 500 series is based on Polaris and will not offer any major surprises. The new graphics card family can be compared to the Radeon 300 series, which was based exclusively on older graphics circuits with adjusted clock frequencies and in some cases changes in the amount of memory and the number of activated calculation units.
Launch: AMD Radeon RX 500 Series “Polaris Refresh”
model | Graphics circuit | Replaces | Launch |
---|---|---|---|
Radeon RX 580 | Polaris 10 | Radeon RX 480 | 18 april |
Radeon RX 570 | Polaris 10 | Radeon RX 470 | 18 april |
Radeon RX 560 | Polaris 11 | Radeon RX 460 | May |
Radeon RX 550 | Polaris 11 | – | End of April |
The first to be launched will be the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570, which are direct replacements for the current RX 480 and RX 470 respectively. For the RX 580, it is once again a full-scale Polaris 10 with 2,304 stream processors, a 256-bit memory bus and 8 GB GDDR5 . The duo will be launched on April 18 and will have slightly higher clock frequencies than its predecessor.
Below these is the Radeon RX 560, which will replace the RX 460 in May and will probably be based on full-scale Polaris 11 with 1,024 stream processors. Before this, AMD plans to release the RX 550 at the end of April, which will be between the RX 460 and R7 360 in terms of performance.
AMD Vega is called Radeon RX Vega
After the Radeon RX 500 series, it’s time for the architecture Vega to make its entrance. Similar to how the Fiji graphics circuit was not part of the Radeon 300 series but was used in graphics cards named Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, R9 Nano and later Radeon Pro Duo, the top model with the architecture Vega will be called Radeon RX Vega.
The launch of Vega takes place sometime during the second quarter of the year, where there are many indications that it will be during the month of May.