Not even a month has passed since semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices launched the RX 480 graphics card. And already, anticipation for the RX 480's successor is running high. In fact, the official AMD website listed the 490 on the same day its predecessor was introduced, as Mobipicker catalogs.
Richard Huddy, who is the chief gaming scientist at AMD, explained the correlation between the names of the cards and their characteristic specs. The RX in the name corresponds to a processing power of over 1.5 TFLOPs, meaning that the card has the capability to touch 60 fps at 1080p resolution. As for the 4 in the label, it stands for the fourth generation of GCN architecture. The number following the 4 represents the tier of gaming that the card is targeted at. The RX 480 supports gaming at 1440p resolution, and is designed to handle a 256-bit memory bus.
PCGamesN extrapolates this understanding further, and concludes that naming the new card RX 490 must naturally mean it targets something greater than a 256-bit memory bus. As for the resolution levels it is expected to support, the card is likely to focus on gaming at 4K.
This is where speculations come in. You see, even the RX 480, with its Polaris 10 graphics processing unit, is incapable of supporting gaming at such high levels of resolution. And that version of the GPU is the highest among the chips that Polaris has to offer in the collection. So where does this leave the RX 490, and what silicon chip will form its core? Guesses pointed to the high-end Vega chips, which are unfortunately a long way off from being manufactured.
As Ecumenical News reports, the new graphics card from AMD may be available by the end of this year. The Vega chips may only make it to the shelves next year, considering that they are only moving on from the design phase to the manufacture testing stage. Putting two and two together, the silicon that will form the core of the new RX 490 remains a mystery.
