AMD Radeon RX 490 release date news 2016: Video card to come with not 1 but 2 Polaris 10 GPUs?

AMD Radeon RX 490 will reportedly be the first graphics cards to employ the new and more powerful Vega 10 architecture, the next-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) and the fastest AMD has ever made.

The AMD Radeon RX 490 was first leaked in a slide that details the company's nomenclature of its GPUs. It then popped up on the official AMD website and on the Sapphire website.

The yet to be announced RX 400 series video card is described as a 4K gaming GPU that comes with memory interface much bigger than 256bit, which is the memory on the RX 470 and 480.

This gives a good look at the GPU's massive power considering that the RX 470 and RX 480 are already positioned as 1440p resolution gaming cards.

Interestingly, the AMD Radeon RX 490 is actually part of AMD's 2016 promotion, which means it should be released before this year ends, making it unlikely to be of a Vega 10 built.

Wccftech points out that the Vega 10 is scheduled for 2017, which is why the leaked graphics card can't be using the powerful architecture. The site also says that it will not be a Polaris 10 card either.

Wccftech suspects that it is a multi-GPU and that AMD is repeating the same technique they had in 2008 wherein the AMD RV770 GPU was used in the HD 4870 and HD 4850 cards.

AMD Senior Vice President and Chief Architect Raja Koduri said that "multi-GPU is a reality for us and we better get the software ecosystem going now than wait a few years."

"Multi-GPU is no longer just an enthusiast play, you know that we do just one bleeding-edge card. The way we think about it strategically is that the concept of multi-GPU is going to extend up and down the stack," he explained further.

This suggests that the AMD Radeon RX 490 might come with two Polaris 10 GPUs instead of one although nothing is corroborated yet. At the moment, the only thing guaranteed is that AMD is working on Vega 10.