Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

[JEMC]

shikamaru317 said:

JEMC said:

I know our discussion is a few days old, but I've realized something that may refute the idea that the 490 is a dual GPU card with Polaris 10 chips.

And it comes from AMD's new naming scheme, and the slide that came with it:

Realize that the tier number gets determined by the memory controller:

9: >256bit
8 - 7: 256bit
6 - 5: 128bit
4: 64bit

An hypothetical 2x480 GPUs card will still have the same 256bit controllers so, by AMD's own rule, it couldn't be named RX 490. If anything, it could be the RX 480X2.

Yeah, I get the feeling that 490 is not a dual 480 card. It must be the bottom Vega chip, though I'm not sure why AMD and the AIB partners accidentally listed 490 so soon before Vega's scheduled release.

What I want to know is what they'll call the rest of the Vega line, they kind of set themselves up for trouble by making Polaris 10  RX 480, that only leaves one higher number for a Vega chip in this gen's nomenclature, RX 490, and there will probably be at least 3 Vega based GPU's. What will the two highest Vega GPU's be called, Fury 2 and Fury X 2? Fury 400 and Fury X 400? It would have been better if Polaris 10 was RX 470, then the 3 Vega chips could have been RX 480, RX 490 and RX 495. 

Why are you assiming that there will be 3 Vega cards? The speculation around those chips talk about Vega 10 & 11 (likely because of the Polaris 10 & 11 codenames). With that in mind, AMD could use Vega 11 with a 384 or 512bit bus and GDDR5X memory as the RX 490, and leave the big Vega 10 chip with HBM2 as the new Fury card.

One thing that could give this idea more ground are the rumors about AMD trying to launch Vega earlier when at GDC they mentioned the high costs of HBM 2 as one of the reasons to not launch it until 2017. They could prioritize the development of the smaller Vega chip with "cheap" GDDR5X memory to try to compete with Nvidia's current high end cards.