AMD Radeon R9 490X And 490 Reportedly Set For June Release

AMD’s upcoming graphics architecture, codenamed ‘Polaris’ will be the company’s first product utilizing the 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. During CES 2016, AMD showcased the greatly improved performance per watt compared to the current 28nm NVIDIA GTX 950. As a result, the upcoming R9 490X and R9 490 will not be another rebranding exercise and should offer significant performance gains. It’s still unclear how AMD will position these products in comparison to the Fury X, Fury and Nano line-up. In theory, the 490X and 490 could be faster than the Fury X which becomes a product designed to compete with the 480. Personally, I’m really not sure, and it’s clear that AMD is really pushing the benefits of performance per watt with Polaris 10. To me that showcases their focus and suggests the main advantages will revolve around TDP.

According to Hardware Battle, and discovered by VideoCardz, the 490X and 490 will apparently launch in June. It looks increasingly likely that AMD will unveil their latest range at Computex. Shortly after that, the products should be with retailers in a swift manner. Hardware Battle is a reliable source and known to have good connections with AMD. While this doesn’t prove that the information is correct, it corresponds with earlier suggestions that AMD was planning the launch during Q2 2016.

On another note, the performance numbers Polaris is capable of should provide an indication of the improvements we can expect on NVIDIA’s GTX 1000 series. Whatever the case, this is an exciting time for the graphics card world, even though the huge strides forward will occur during the next architecture. It’s still unclear when NVIDIA will launch their consumer HBM2 graphics cards. Rumors suggest consumer Pascal might not happen until next year.

Personally, I’m just excited to see the industry move away from 28nm graphics cards to instigate a brand new era of hardware advancements.