AMD Radeon RX 490 release date, specs news, rumors: Company to launch GPU with Vega architecture?

AMD Radeon RX 480, the predecessor of the upcoming Radeon RX 490Twitter/AMD

AMD's next generation GPUs will be based on the Vega architecture, which will use high-bandwidth memory, second generation (HBM2). The first card rumored to roll out with the new technology is the Radeon RX 490 video graphics card, and the launch could possibly happen during the first half of 2017.

The still-unannounced GPU is categorized by the company as a 4K gaming graphics card, and it is characterized by a memory interface that is bigger than 256bit, which is the current limitation of cards in the market. The card is designed to handle big volumes of data to cope with the large resolution it is supposed to provide.

The AMD Radeon RX490 is speculated to still be using the 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, and rumored to contain 4096 Cores, 256 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. Its base clock could be at 1,200 MHz and around 9,830 GFLOPS computing power. Its memory size is estimated to be at 16 GB HBM2, with 4096-bit memory bus width and a 716.8 GB/s memory bandwidth, as posted on Video Cardz.

However, with this amount of capability, it is estimated to require at least 200W TDP. It also needs a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 interface, which is a standard for modern motherboards.

The community expects that the next generation card would be offered next year, but there are subtle clues that it could happen this year. PC Gamers N stated that the still-unannounced GPU was mentioned on a game promotion that AMD themselves published. The first time it happened, the company said that it was a "communication error," while the second instance, they simply took out the name of the card from the list.

Concerning the price, the AMD RX 490 is speculated to have a similar performance with NVIDIA's GTX 1080, retailing at around US$600. This could be the price point for AMDs top-tier cards. However, nothing is official right now since the company has not issued a statement about its unannounced video graphics card.