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AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

AMD technically just launched a new lineup of GPUs this calendar week, simply don't worry if you tin can't find them on store shelves. The new 500X family unit adds an "10" to the make of each previous Radeon card. The Radeon RX 580 is now the RX 580X, the 570 is the 570X, etc, etc, right on down the stack. But that'south 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 get information technology.

Gamers tend to dislike these periodic rebranding efforts, merely they've been a feature (or "feature") of the GPU market for decades. GPU companies frequently keep depression-end models effectually for ii-3 refresh cycles, or split the low and higher ends of the market between a suite of upper-level cards that are refreshed more quickly, while lower-end models on outdated process nodes may crash-land along for a longer period of time.

Gamers tend to blame AMD and Nvidia for these efforts, viewing them as an attempt to hoodwink gamers into paying for "new" fries that aren't new at all. According to AMD, that'southward non what's driving this refresh bicycle. "There are no hardware differences to non-X [RX 500 GPUs]," an AMD spokesperson told PCWorld. "The Radeon RX 500X serial graphics cards is a brand refresh for 2022 OEM platforms that ensures Radeon RX 500 serial cards are using the latest 'Polaris' architecture-based hardware and commuter revisions (Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition) for 2022."

Radeon500XSeries
Nosotros've put this question to OEMs before, and they more often than not concord with AMD (Nvidia has explained the situation similarly as well). PC OEMs like regular brand refreshes. Information technology gives them new opportunities to market parts that are new equally opposed to actually having to validate and bring upwards new designs from scratch. And if we're going to accept to deal with this kind of issue on a regular basis, I'd actually rather companies kept the model numbers simpler. Spinning upward a new product brand (Radeon 6xx) would be more likely to leave people thinking they're getting fundamentally new hardware equally opposed to the same chips that have previously been bachelor.

There'southward no expectation that the Radeon 500X family unit volition even come to store shelves, simply if y'all should happen to see the odd bill of fare for auction hither or there, you can just knock the "X" off and read the product equally a standard 500-series part. As of this writing, we're non enlightened of any near-term AMD plan for a midrange refresh this year — the only public GPU launch on the roadmap the company announced at CES were plans for a 7nm machine learning variant of Vega equally a pipecleaner for GF'southward 7nm process node later this year. Such a chip would be a very limited run part intended to validate the process rather than a major launch or revenue driver.