AMD RX 490 release date, news: 4K and VR-capable GPU to launch next month?

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

The AMD RX 490 was previously mentioned to be announced later this year. Now, the latest reports suggest that the 4K and VR-capable graphics card will finally become official next month.

The upcoming top-tier GPU will be the company's answer to NVIDIA's GTX 1080. A similar price point is also expected from the Polaris-based card. Currently, AMD's most powerful GPU is the RX 480, and it is based on the Polaris 10 architecture. It is equivalent to the NVIDIA GTX 1060 in terms of graphical performance, according to WCCFTech.

Based on the previous leaks, the alleged computer component will either contain a dual Polaris 10-based or Vega 10-based chips, speculated to have a larger bus width than 256 bits, which will largely assist in providing a very high resolution display for monitors and virtual reality (VR).

Having a dual-GPU has its advantage. The card can dedicate each processor for each eye, which will then yield a more immersive computer generated environment. The same setup will also make life easier for the developers since there is enough power to process the codes of their applications.

A few months ago, the same publication mentioned that AMD inadvertently listed the RX 490 on its website. This started the ball rolling for the rumblings that it has now. This was then followed by the discovery of a Zauba shipment record and an RRA certification.

There were several cards listed, but the attention was focused on an item called "C99." The insurance value of the said card was also twice as much as the RX 480, thus, it was speculated that it could contain two Polaris 10-based chips. AMD also previously said that two RX 480s is equivalent to a single GTX 1080.

It is further believed that the RX 490 would have a clock speed of 1,201 MHz, 11 TFLOPS of computing performance, a 512-bit bus width, and stream processor (CUDA Cores) of 2,304. The other technical specifications of the card remain unknown.

In the meantime, the community is looking forward to next month if the AMD RX 490 will become official.