We’ve previously covered how AMD’s RX 500 series is to be a rebrand of the company’s successful RX 400 series. Previous reports pegged the RX 500 series’ launch on April 11th; now, it would seem that there has been a slight, one-week delay on the launch date, with it having been pushed back to April 18th. Apparently, this delay is looking to allow more time to “fine-tune the drivers”.
The RX 500 series are purportedly straight rebrands from equivalent RX 400 series GPUs (RX 580 will be a rebrand of the RX 480, and so on down the ladder). The need for driver fine-tuning seems a little baffling considering these straight rebrands, but may have more to do with the reported Polaris 12 chips that are expected for launch than any other metric. Remember, RX 500 chips are expected to carry somewhat higher clock-speeds than their RX 400 originals, with some improved power/performance ratio being derived from improvements in foundry processes. But if the rebranding scheme holds up, don’t expect these to bring in any meaningful changes towards these cards’ performance. AMD is hoping Polaris tides them over through the mainstream market until it can introduce its Vega-based, high-performance GPUs, which are heralded to mark AMD’s return to the high-performance consumer graphics segment in a while. Fingers crossed.
Source: eTeknixSource: Thanks @TheMailMan78!
