After the launching of the Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 1080 by NVIDIA, observers have their sights aimed at AMD as rumors of its Radeon RX 490 graphics card release have floated on the internet. Since the newest motherboard accessory has never been discussed in the company's next generation GPU Polaris series, it is suspected that the card will be a part of the up and coming Vega family.
AMD's RX 490 4K gaming graphics card has so far made three surprise appearances. Clues for this unconfirmed RX 400 series graphics flagship have been detailed on a Radeon nomenclature slide. Shortly after, the very same graphics processing unit (GPU) information has been discovered on the AMD and partner Sapphire websites.
In a recent briefing about the Radeon list, Richard Huddy, AMD's chief gaming scientist, has provided an insight into the company' current GPU processing. The RX 480 denotes a greater than 1.5 teraflops of processing power with the capability to hit 60 fps at 1080p in popular games like DOTA 2 and LOL. The point being assessed here is about widely accessible titles and not serious GPU intensive games. The "4" in the name indicates the generation while the "8" is the tier of gaming that it is aimed for. An AMD with an 8 or 7 means having a 256-bit memory line with the ability to deliver gaming performance at 1440p resolutions.
Now comes the interesting part which is RX 490. Huddy has explained that this series card is aiming beyond the 256-bit with a target on gaming at 4K. This means that this card will be delivering a powerful gaming performance at the very highest resolution levels, probably beyond the 4K. With a Polaris 10 GPU, the RX 480 cannot deliver what the 490 is capable of giving which means that a high-end architecture will be accommodating the new Radeon. This is where the Vega chips come in. Most likely, the Vega will be in the market in 2017 at the earliest.
