AMD RX 500 Launch Slides Leak Official Specs and Performance

Just as early rumours had predicted, AMD is set to release their new RX 500 series of graphics cards next week. Arriving on April 18th, the pseudo-refresh of the RX 400 lineup is expected to feature a mix of refreshed and old GPUs. Luckily for us, we now have what appears to the official launch slides courtesy of the latest leaks.

As expected, we have the pretty much confirmed RX 580, RX 570 and RX 550. Interestingly, we also have the missing RX 560 was expected to be a refresh of the RX 460. In addition to refreshed GPUs, AMD has also introduced new dual fan reference designs for the RX 580 and RX 570 and RX 560 and a new single fan reference cooler for the new RX 550. For the GPUs themselves, AMD has moved onto 3rd Gen 14nm FinFETs which are likely the source of the higher clocks and increased efficiency being claimed.

First up is the RX 580 which is largely the same as the RX 480. While AMD is silent on the exact GPU, it is expected to be based on Polaris 20 which is a refreshed version of Polaris 20. The 2304 GCN 4 stream processors are clocked slightly higher at 1257 MHz base and 1340 MHz boost. Just like it’s predecessor, we will have 4GB and 8GB GDDR5 models with a 256bit bus.

With a slightly cut down version of Polaris 20, we have the RX 570 with 2048 stream processors. These 32 Compute Units are clocked at up to 1244 MHz boost with an 1168 MHz base clock. As with the RX 580, we have either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 over a 256bit bus.

For the RX 560, AMD is changing things up a bit. Instead of a straight up refresh of the RX 460, AMD is choosing to utilise the full Polaris 11 die. This helps fill in the gap between Polaris 11 and Polaris 12 which the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1060 3GB were fitting into quite nicely. We were already seeing some RX 460 models arrive with the full 1024 stream processors on Polaris 11 instead of 896 as initially launched so this just a change of the official stance. Combined with the 1175 MHz base and 1275 MHz boost clock, we should see a decent increase in performance over the RX 460.

Finally, we have the new RX 550 which uses the Polaris 12 GPU. With 512 stream processors, it is about half the performance of the RX 560. We have a relatively low boost clock of 1183 MHz and just 2GB of GDDR5 over the 128bit bus. Lastly, it is interesting to see that AMD is making comparisons to the RX 300 series rather than the RX 400. As a refresh, there is little performance improvement in most cases over the RX 400 series which is likely why AMD is comparing against their older lineup.