ASUS Reportedly Prepping Radeon RX 590 ROG Strix Polaris Refresh Graphics Card
AMD seems to be focusing on squeezing as much out of its Polaris architecture as possible while we wait for Navi to arrive. There have already been several generations of Polaris parts, including the Radeon RX 400 series, Radeon RX 500 series, and a refreshed release of the latter. Now there is chatter of a Radeon RX 590 model being around the bend.
A Radeon RX 590 would be an interesting wrinkle to the Polaris lineup, given that it's recently been rumored AMD would launch 12nm Polaris 30 GPUs. As the rumor goes, Polaris 30 would be used in upcoming Radeon RX 680 and Radeon RX 670 models. None of this has been announced, of course, but we can certainly envision AMD stretching out its Polaris architecture for another round.
Getting back to the Radeon RX 590, the folks at Videocardz heard from a source that ASUS is bringing back its ROG Strix branding to AMD's Radeon RX family. "The information came from the same source that told us about Arez brand before it went live," the site says. It's not clear what would happen to the Arez branding in that scenario.
The first of these is said to be the Radeon RX 590 ROG Strix Gaming (ROG-STRIX-RX590-8G-GAMING). Interestingly, there's a listing in 3DMark's database that shows a "Generic VGA" card with higher clocks than the Radeon RX 580, which some believe could be a Radeon RX 590 card. It's hard to tell with these sort of things, so take it with a grain of salt.
It's also interesting that AMD is paying more attention to Polaris than Vega these day. That could be in part due to the higher costs of HBM memory compared to GDDR5 memory chips. Polaris allows AMD to chase the bang-for-buck crowd, and another refresh of Polaris could buy the company some time while it continues working on Navi (and beyond). We'll just have to wait and see.
