Alleged AMD Radeon RX 490 Ashes Of The Singularity Benchmarks Reveal GeForce GTX 1080 Class Performance

Rumor surrounding AMD's next high-end GPU, tentatively called the Radeon RX 490, have been floating around for a while. Admittedly, it's been extremely difficult to get a real gauge on what to expect. Some say that the RX 490 won't even match NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070, but now, we have a benchmark that shows us that it might be just as fast as the GTX 1080.

Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity became a de facto benchmark out-of-the-gate due to its use of DirectX 12, and not to mention its built-in benchmark. At the start of the month, a user named Ceaj uploaded a rather peculiar result, featuring a GPU ID'd 687F:C1.

AotS can ID released graphics cards, so the fact that this comes up without a name points to an upcoming GPU, and since it manages to match a GTX 1080 and isn't a GTX 1080, it almost seems obvious that this is AMD's Vega-based RX 490.

It's important to not jump to too many conclusions, though, because other AotS benchmark results highlight the fact that you can gain identical scores on dissimilar GPUs. If you check 1080p preset results, for example, and scroll down, you'll see everything from a GTX 980 to mobile Radeon R9 200 hitting the same score of 8,400. Other system hardware can help affect these scores, though, including the CPU (especially if it's overclocked).

AMD's current-gen champion: Radeon RX 480

Right now, we should take this with a grain of salt, but even if we do that, it's still hard to ignore the fact that AMD's next GPU could be hugely competitive at the high-end, which is something many of us have been hoping to see for some time.

If there's an upside to a rumor like this, it's that we won't need to wait that much longer for a final answer. We're not sure exactly when AMD is planning for a public unveil of its new card, but at this point, it seems increasingly likely that we'll hear about something at CES, which takes place at the start of January.