As with any rumor, you should probably treat this with a healthy bit of skepticism, but several major tech sites are reporting on leaks regarding an upcoming RX 600 line of graphics cards from Radeon. And you know what? It actually makes sense.
With NVIDIA’s new RTX 20 series of graphics cards that made its official release on September 20, gamers were treated to some very high-end tech and the promise of real-time ray tracing. Sure, ray tracing is often thought of as a “holy grail” of the gaming world, and the performance on the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti at 4K is rather awesome, but these cards command a very hefty price tag (the “lower end” RTX 2080 starts at a whopping $799.99 right now). It’s one thing if you have incredibly deep pockets and you demand the absolute best in terms of resolution and performance, but for most people these cards will be unnecessary and out of reach. Also, very few games will be making use of the real-time ray tracing features of the card anyway, so it is a bit of a gamble on the future.
However, the RX Vega cards aside, AMD has lately been focused on providing extremely capable and budget friendly cards to the more mainstream PC gaming market, and honestly that’s a pretty good move on their end. Their Polaris line of GPUs that were featured in the RX 400 and RX 500 series of cards were more than capable of hitting into the 1440p resolution arena (and offered exceptional performance at 1080p) for very reasonable prices. Of course, back in 2016 and 2017, NVIDIA’s more budget-minded GTX 1060 cards (particularly the 6GB version) offered a good bit of competition. Yet, as of right now, the “mainstream” tier of cards in the new RTX 20 line is nonexistent, leaving a space that Radeon (AMD) can easily step into.
Supposedly this as-yet-unannounced RX 600 series will be based on yet another revision of their Polaris GPU architecture, dubbed “Polaris 30.” However, unlike the RX 500 series which featured rather minor tweaks to the GPU, this new revision will be built on a 12nm process (as opposed to 14nm), meaning that power consumption as well as overall processing power should get a nice boost. Estimates are pointing to the RX 680 being around 15% better than the RX 580. However, that’s speculation at this point and if these cards are indeed on the horizon, we just have to wait to see what they really have to offer. The cards will most likely feature GDDR5 memory once again as opposed to the newer GDDR6 format featured in the RTX 20 series.
Leaks are saying these cards should make their debut between October and November of this year, so as we are already in October now if the rumors are true we shouldn’t have very long to wait.