Some interesting news started to buzz around the internet last week about AMD’s upcoming Polaris GPU seeming dubbed the R9 490. We have been hearing rumours for a while now, even before the launch of their R9 480 during Q3 of this year, but now we have some hard to ignore rumours from a reputable source. The folks over at WCCFTECH who first broke the news this year of a possible end of year launch of the high end card, just added more oil to the fire with this recent statement on their site:
We told you about the RX 490 approximately 4 months ago and how it is expected to launch by year end. Well, we have just received further reports that the card will not only be announced in December, but will be launched in December as well. In fact, it will be announced and launched on the very same day – so we are not looking at a soft or paper launch but an actual release day in the very near future. The card has been listed on AIB websites (and even AMD Official) for quite some while now – so everything appears to be ready.
We know for sure that the 490 will be competing punch for punch with the Nvidia 1080 (atleast we hope). The few things known about the card so far is:
- It will target the 4K resolution and be the go-to graphics card for VR.
- It will have a bus width greater than 256 bits.
- It will be based on either a dual-GPU Polaris 10 design or Vega 10.
- Its going to be close to the price point of the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080.
This is fantastic news for AMD who have been waiting out the urge to buy new GPU cards over the holiday season. This news along with the upcoming launch of the new AMD Zen CPU’s coming in 2017, AMD seems to be shaping up for quite the big comeback to the PC market. After years of stagnating sales, these upcoming products is just what AMD, and its loyal fan base need.
