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Launching today is AMD's new Radeon RX 500 series. As we're covering in our companion launch article, the RX 500 series is a refresh of Polaris, bringing about newer, faster SKUs based on the existing Polaris 10 and 11 GPUs. Also joining the family is a newer, smaller GPU, Polaris 12, which will be the basis of the Radeon RX 550. AMD is using an updated revision of Polaris for all of these products, so there are some minor clockspeed improvements and a new memory state that have been baked into the RX 500 family that is not present in the RX 400 family, which makes the new RX 500 parts a bit more interesting.
The first Radeon RX 500 cards out of the gate are the Radeon RX 580 and the Radeon 570, which we're reviewing today. These SKUs are pretty straightforward: take the new Polaris 10 GPU revision, plug it into more powerful boards, turn up the clockspeeds a bit, and you have a new SKU. AMD hasn't done anything wild here – the configurations haven't changed, and in fact TBPs have gone up – so relative to the RX 480 and RX 470, at the end of the day it's a set of slightly more powerful cards for the same price as before.
Because these are just minor performance improvements over the existing RX 480 and RX 470 cards, these newer cards replace the RX 400 cards in AMD's product stack, but they aren't intended as upgrades for existing owners. Instead they're meant to tempt owners of cards like the R9 280 and R9 380 series who didn't already upgrade to Polaris. For those owners who did hold off, their reward is a slightly more powerful upgrade option in 2017 than they would have gotten in 2016.
Another article at PC World
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday April 24 2017, @10:06PM (4 children)
Isn't VEGA supposed to be coming out soon - or is this it?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday April 24 2017, @10:19PM (1 child)
It is a Polaris refresh, not Vega.
I think what AMD likes to do is alternatingly launch for low/mid end and high end. So Vega launch will not include anything like the $80 RX 550.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday April 24 2017, @10:41PM
That release pattern would stand to reason, looking at their approach to releasing their latest CPU.
Given the massive discrepancy in performance with Ryzen CPUs paired with NVidia cards, I am refusing to support either Intel or Nvidia with my next build. Every company has issues, but their underhanded tactics are shameful.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 24 2017, @10:24PM (1 child)
Vega is another architecture entirely. This is to Polaris (4xx series) basically what Carrizo was to Kaveri/Godavari if even that much of a change. I thought I saw someone on Anandtech say he flashed his RX480 with a 500-series firmware and it now shows up as a genuine RX 580. I'm...not sure what to think of that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday April 24 2017, @10:38PM
Vega is another architecture entirely.
This was my initial impression when I read about it maybe a month ago. I only ask instead of search because I figured others may have the same question and/or have surrounding information, so it's an interesting and relevant point about the flashing.
I will continue to wait and even then, likely wait some more until the drivers are fixed...consumerism is fun.