AMD's Radeon RX 490 May Have Appeared In a Benchmark

AMD’s unannounced Radeon RX 490 may have shown up in a benchmark

By Kevin Parrish December 6, 2016

AMD Radeon RX 470 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

AMD is slated to host its “New Horizon” event next week on December 13 to showcase live demos of its “Zen” processor architecture and the first “Summit Ridge” desktop CPUs to use it. The company is also expected to reveal several other products at the public event including motherboards that will support the Summit Ridge chips, and the Radeon RX 490 and Pro 490 graphics cards. These cards are believed to rely on dual graphics chips based on AMD’s current “Polaris” design that are mounted on a single card, or a single chip based on the company’s next-generation “Vega” architecture.

Right now, there are a lot of fingers pointing to Vega as the architecture that’s used in the two 490 cards. The RX 490 will be the consumer-focused version, which may have conveniently showed up in an Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. Or at least, there’s an assumption that a hardware Device ID listed in the benchmark, aka 687F:C18, is AMD’s potential GeForce GTX 1080 killer for high-end PC gaming.

The number itself indicates that the graphics chip in question has yet to have an associated name. It’s also similar to the numbers AMD uses for its Polaris-based GPUs, and nothing close to what Nvidia uses for its GeForce-based Device IDs. And because the stored benchmark provides higher numbers than what benchmarks show for the Radeon RX 480 graphics card, there’s an assumption that the mystery GPU in question is in fact the unannounced Radeon RX 490.

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That said, the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark seemingly strikes down the possibility that the Radeon RX 490 will utilize two Polaris-based graphics chips, as they would have listed as a dual-GPU solution. Instead, the upcoming card will probably use the Vega 10 variant of AMD’s next-generation design for high-end gaming. AMD was slated to launch its Vega-based cards in the first quarter of 2017, so there’s a good chance the company will live up to that promise by revealing the card(s) next week followed by a retail release at the beginning of January.

At the time of this writing, the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark sporting the unnamed AMD graphics chip would not load. However, captured screenshots reveal that the test bed also included an Intel Core i7-5930K clocked at 3.50GHz, and 32GB of memory. The test bed scored 8,400 points using the 1080p preset level. Here are the numbers:

	Frame Rate	CPU Frame Rate
Averages (All Batches):	85.1	110.6
Normal Batch:	94.3	115.6
Medium Batch:	85.9	117.3
Heavy Batch:	76.9	100.4

Another screenshot shows the overall ranking of the benchmark, placing it as No. 131. What’s interesting to note here is that the card fits in with other benchmarks using the GeForce GTX 1080, which has an average frame rate of around 85 to 87 frames per second (depending on the benchmark) whereas the unannounced AMD card managed an average of 85 frames per second.

The Radeon RX 490 will reportedly include 8GB or 16GB of “stacked” HBM2 on-board memory, a memory bandwidth of up to 512GB per second, and 4,096 shader processors crammed into 64 Compute Units. It’s also slated to provide 24 TFLOPS of half-precision performance, and 12 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance. That’s all just rumor of course, but perhaps we will get the official details from AMD during its public showcase next week.

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