Rumors of a refresh of AMD's long-running RX 500 series graphics cards -- which are themselves a rebrand and overclock of the RX 400 series, which are themselves... you get the picture -- continue to spool up this week, with the latest ones pointing to the weekend of October 13 as the date when the cards will first debut. They would likely be named the RX 600 series and would represent a small improvement in clock speeds and efficiency, leading to modest gains in performance.
The cards would, according to Hexus' sources, utilize a Polaris 30 GPU, which is an iteration on the Polaris 10 design that is based on the Graphics Core Next architecture which it's been utilizing in its graphics cards since 2011. It would be a die shrink down to 12nm which makes some more room for additional transistors, could drop power requirements and cooling demands, but should make it possible for a clock speed increase too.
Shader units, memory type and interfaces will all remain the same, we're told, but changes in physical dimensions of the GPU could actually mean they're cheaper to produce, so could debut at a lower price point than the existing RX 580 and 570 cards.
If AMD could deliver RX 580-like performance, or even slightly greater at a price point under $200, it would heavily undercut Nvidia's GTX 1060 6GB cards and get ahead of any potential release of a GTX 2060, which isn't expected for some time and will likely come in far more expensive anyhow.
The rumor suggests that the RX 670 will launch this coming weekend, with the RX 680 coming in November. We'll have to wait and see to find out for sure.
