Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Recent hands-on photos confirm that Radeon RX 500 Series cards are on the way

Kevin Parrish
By

AMD Radeon RX 470
After recently appearing in the Radeon Crimson 17.3.2 beta driver files, AMD’s unannounced Radeon RX 500 Series of graphics cards now show up as purported engineering samples in several images published online. The images supposedly show someone holding the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 cards. Keep in mind, though, that these are refreshes of the RX 470 and RX 480 cards currently on the market, and will serve as affordable mainstream alternatives to AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX Vega family of GPUs targeting the enthusiast PC gaming market.

Based on the provided photographs, the RX 570 engineering sample is based on the same printed circuit board used with the RX 470 and RX 480 cards. The photos also show that the sample does not include a DVI port, but the RX 570 will reportedly be made available with custom printed circuit boards enabling third-party manufacturers to tack on additional features. And like the RX 470 before it, the RX 570 will rely on a single 6-pin power connector.

Related Videos

On the RX 580 front, the pictured engineering sample sports a new board design (C940) backed by a new 8-pin power connector. The included engineering label shows that AMD manufactured the card on March 3, 2017, and it does rely on AMD’s Polaris graphics chip design architecture. The 8-pin connector indicates that the upcoming card can be overclocked at the expense of a higher power requirement.

Again, here is what we know about all three RX 500 Series cards so far:

Radeon RX 580 Radeon RX 570 Radeon RX 560
Process node: 14nm FinFET LPP 14nm FinFET LPP 14nm FinFET LPP
Graphics chip: Polaris 20 XTX Polaris 20 XL Polaris 11
Stream processors: 2,304 2,048 896
Compute units: 36 32 14
Texture mapping units: 144 128 56
Render output units: 32 32 16
Boost speed: ~1,340MHz ~1,244MHz ~1,287MHz
Performance gain: 74MHz 38MHz 87MHz
Compute performance: 6.17 TFLOPS 5.10 TFLOPS 2.63 TFLOPS
Memory size: Up to 8GB GDDR5 Up to 8GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5
Memory interface: 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit
Memory speed: 8GHz 7GHz 7GHz
Memory bandwidth: 256GB/s 224GB/s 112GB/s
Power connector: 1x 8-pin 1x 6-pin 1x 6-pin

All three Radeon RX 500 Series cards are expected to go retail sometime around April 18, which is when Nvidia will reportedly make OC versions of its GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 graphics cards available on the market. AMD’s family of Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, which are based on its newer Vega GPU design, will likely arrive shortly thereafter. Rumors point to the Computex convention starting May 30, but AMD may wait to launch the Radeon RX Vega line at a special event prior to E3 2017 starting June 13.

The big deal with AMD’s Radeon RX 500 Series cards in relation to the older RX 400 units is improved performance based on a tweaked Polaris architecture and better 14nm FinFET processing. Here are the performance differences based on the leaked specs of the Radeon RX 500 cards:

RX 580 RX 480 RX 570 RX 470 RX 560 RX 460
FP32 compute: 6.17
TFLOPS		 5.83
TFLOPS		 5.10
TFLOPS		 4.94
TFLOPS		 2.93
TFLOPS		 2.15
TFLOPS

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
For the first time ever, I’m ready to switch to an AMD graphics card
AMD RX 7900 XTX standing up on a red background.

Fine, AMD. You win. I'm jumping ship.

With the launch of the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, this Nvidia fan was finally convinced to pick up an AMD graphics card as my next upgrade. I can't believe I'm saying it, but for the first time ever, I couldn't be more excited to be going Team Red.
I was never a fan of AMD

Read more
The dream isn’t over — AMD’s RX 7900 XTX may still hit 3GHz
The RX 7900 XTX.

Prior to AMD's launch of its new RDNA 3 GPUs, the rumor mill has been running wild with speculation about clock speeds on the new flagships. Some sources said that the cards would be able to hit 3GHz; 4GHz has also been floated around as a highly unbelievable, but enticing theory. Now that we know more about the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, it's safe to say they won't be hitting 3GHz, let alone 4GHz.

With that said, it seems that 3GHz for RDNA 3 is not entirely out of the question -- it just seems very unlikely to happen on AMD's own reference models. Here's what we know.

Read more
Intel’s A770 GPU outperforms the RTX 4090 in one key way
Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs are great for Twitch.

Intel's discrete GPUs are the new kids on the block and have to prove themselves worthy. Intel's A770 GPU took a huge step in that direction, as shown in a recent benchmark test that demonstrates surprisingly strong performance in high-resolution video playback, outperforming Nvidia's best GPU, the GeForce RTX 4090.

In an extreme stress test, the CapFrameX team played back a super high-quality YouTube video showing aerial footage of several cities in Japan and recorded the frame rates from three different GPUs. The video was created with the AV1 codec in 8K resolution at 60 frames per second (fps). It's a huge amount of data that arrives quickly but Intel's A770 graphics card delivered an average of 59.9 fps. Meanwhile, Nvidia's RTX 4090 averaged 57.6 fps. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT was also tested and really struggled, reaching 22 fps.

Read more