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AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

AMD technically only launched a new lineup of GPUs this week, but don't worry if you can't find them on store shelves. The new 500X family adds an "Ten" to the brand of each previous Radeon card. The Radeon RX 580 is at present the RX 580X, the 570 is the 570X, etc, etc, right on down the stack. Merely that's literally the only changes to these cards.

The RX 580X is an RX 580. The RX 570X is an RX 570. The RX 560X is… you go information technology.

Gamers tend to dislike these periodic rebranding efforts, just they've been a characteristic (or "feature") of the GPU marketplace for decades. GPU companies often keep low-end models around for 2-three refresh cycles, or carve up the low and higher ends of the market between a suite of upper-level cards that are refreshed more chop-chop, while lower-end models on outdated process nodes may bump forth for a longer menses of time.

Gamers tend to arraign AMD and Nvidia for these efforts, viewing them as an endeavor to hoodwink gamers into paying for "new" chips that aren't new at all. According to AMD, that's not what'southward driving this refresh cycle. "In that location are no hardware differences to not-X [RX 500 GPUs]," an AMD spokesperson told PCWorld. "The Radeon RX 500X series graphics cards is a make refresh for 2018 OEM platforms that ensures Radeon RX 500 series cards are using the latest 'Polaris' architecture-based hardware and commuter revisions (Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition) for 2018."

Radeon500XSeries
We've put this question to OEMs before, and they generally agree with AMD (Nvidia has explained the situation similarly too). PC OEMs similar regular brand refreshes. It gives them new opportunities to market parts that are new as opposed to actually having to validate and bring upward new designs from scratch. And if we're going to take to deal with this kind of issue on a regular ground, I'd actually rather companies kept the model numbers simpler. Spinning up a new production brand (Radeon 6xx) would be more likely to exit people thinking they're getting fundamentally new hardware equally opposed to the aforementioned chips that have previously been available.

In that location'southward no expectation that the Radeon 500X family unit will fifty-fifty come to store shelves, but if y'all should happen to meet the odd menu for sale hither or at that place, you can just knock the "X" off and read the product equally a standard 500-series part. Every bit of this writing, we're non aware of whatsoever near-term AMD programme for a midrange refresh this twelvemonth — the only public GPU launch on the roadmap the visitor announced at CES were plans for a 7nm car learning variant of Vega as a pipecleaner for GF'south 7nm process node later this twelvemonth. Such a fleck would exist a very limited run part intended to validate the process rather than a major launch or revenue commuter.