AMD has reportedly set April 18 as release date for the Radeon RX 500 series cards as suggested in the latest round of leaks that purportedly detailed the official specifications, performance capabilities and pricing for what is perceived as precursor to the RX Vega GPUs.
The RX 500 will be formally launched on the date mentioned, Videocardz reported, but not all cards in the series will be immediately available. It is expected that the premium models RX 580 and RX 570 will come out first with the balance of the line following shortly.
Completing the series are RX 560 and RX 550, which WCCFTech said will be on Polaris 11 and 12, respectively, while the 580 and 570 will be on Polaris 10. The whole line represents a refresh of the Polaris platform that AMD used with the RX 400 series in 2016.
As expected, the cream of the crop is the RX 580 and will be the direct descendant of the RX 480 or essentially the materialization of the rumored RX 490. The leaked details indicated that the card is fully capable of 60fps rendering at 1440p with the following specs: 8GB/4GB GDDR5 memory, 8.0GHz clock speed at 256-bit bus interface.
The RX 580 is seen to sell with the same starting price of the RX 480 last year, which was at $230.
The RX 570, on the other hand, will render too in 60fps but only in 1080p. The card will boast of 8GB GDDR5 that will be clocked at 7.0GHz in 224 GB/s bandwidth. Pricing will start at $170.
As for the RX 560 and RX 550, the cards will deliver more than decent performance to please gaming enthusiasts but the real draw will come in the form of affordable sticker price. The 560 is expected to retail for no more than $120 while the 550 is AMD's bet for PC gamers looking to score capable graphics card under the $100 range.
It's important to note though that while the RX 500 series on release date will certainly impress with high-performance and reasonable pricing, AMD's real GPU flagship bet for 2017 and the direct challenge to NVIDIA's high-end cards is the Radeon RX Vega series that will come out later in the year.