Radeon RX 500 Series Graphics Cards May Still Be On AMD's 2017 Roadmap Despite The Vega Branding Reveal

AMD’s Radeon roadmap may include refreshed versions of the 400 Series

The RX 480. — Image used with permission by copyright holder

After AMD’s Capsaicin and Crème press event on Tuesday, we now know that the company’s upcoming next-generation line of graphics cards will be branded Radeon RX Vega. That’s because the new chip architecture is codenamed Vega — a name so cool and catchy that AMD decided to cram it into the official branding.

But there is still talk about a Radeon RX 500 Series of graphics cards slated for April. These products will not be based on the new Vega architecture, but rather the Polaris design used in the current Radeon RX 400 Series. Radeon Technologies Group head Raja Koduri even admitted at the event that GPU updates would be released during 2017.

“There’s a lot of speculation about our next series of gaming GPUs. I get asked many times on social media and all, ‘Hey when is 490 coming’ or ‘when is 580’ or ‘590.’ They’re inventing lots of brand names for us on what Vega is going to be called. We have a lot of interesting GPU updates lined up for the rest of the year.”

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According to rumors, the Radeon RX 480 will be rebranded as the Radeon RX 580 and sold with an increased clock speed. The Radeon RX 470 will be rebranded as well, sporting a new Radeon RX 570 name and an increase clock speed. These two cards are expected to arrive on April 4.

After that, AMD will reportedly increase the clock speed of the Radeon RX 460 and rebrand it as the Radeon RX 560. AMD plans to launch a new card, too, called the Radeon RX 550, which will join the RX 560 when it hits retail shelves on April 11. AMD’s Radeon RX Vega cards aren’t expected to arrive until May or possibly during E3 2017 in early June.

Here is the list of rumored specs next to the current Radeon RX 400 Series cards:

	RX 580	RX 480
Graphics chip:	Polaris 10	Polaris 10
Cores:	2,304	2,304
Texture Mapping Units:	144	144
Render Output Units:	32	32
FP32 Compute Performance:	6.17 TFLOPS	5.83 TFLOPS
Boost speed:	~1,340MHz	1,266MHz
Memory amount:	4GB and 8GB GDDR5	4GB and 8GB GDDR5
Memory speed:	8,000MHz	8,000MHz
Memory bus:	256-bit	256-bit
Bandwidth:	256GBps	256GBps

	RX 570	RX 470
Graphics chip:	Polaris 10	Polaris 10
Cores:	2,048(?)	2,048
Texture Mapping Units:	112(?)	112
Render Output Units:	32	32
FP32 Compute Performance:	5.10 TFLOPS	4.94 TFLOPS
Boost speed:	~1,244MHz	1,206MHz
Memory amount:	4GB and 8GB GDDR5	4GB and 8GB GDDR5
Memory speed:	7,000MHz	7,000MHz
Memory bus:	256-bit	256-bit
Bandwidth:	224GBps	211GBps

	RX 560	RX 460
Graphics chip:	Polaris 11	Polaris 11
Cores:	1,024	896
Texture Mapping Units:	64	56
Render Output Units:	16	16
FP32 Compute Performance:	2.63 TFLOPS	2.15 TFLOPS
Boost speed:	~1,287MHz	1,200MHz
Memory amount:	4GB GDDR5	2GB and 4GB GDDR5
Memory speed:	7,000MHz	7,000MHz
Memory bus:	128-bit	128-bit
Bandwidth:	112GBps	112GBps

As for the Radeon RX 550, it may be based on a Polaris 12 graphics chip although that is merely speculation at this point. Actually, all of this is based on mere rumor and speculation, but at least we know something is in the Radeon pipeline outside the upcoming Vega lineup. Koduri admitted this during Tuesday’s press event, so perhaps there is some merit to the information listed above.

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