We now have a release date for AMD's Radeon Pro Duo graphics card, at least according to the rumour mill, and the good news is this beefy beast of a pixel-shifter is due to drop soon.
Korean tech site Hardware Battle, an often cited source of GPU-related speculation, reckons that AMD's new beast of a card will be out on April 26 – in just a smidge over a fortnight's time.
Although you'll need to steel your wallet – or indeed perhaps steal someone else's – to be able to afford the thing, given that the retail price has previously been announced as $1,499 (around £1,060, or AU$1,980).
It's so expensive because AMD has actually crammed dual GPUs on board the Pro Duo (hence the name). Given its huge amount of power under the bonnet – 16 teraflops of computing performance to be precise – this is a video card pitched at VR content creators, as well as enthusiast PC owners and their high-end rigs. (In gaming benchmarking, the Pro Duo is just over 50% faster than a GeForce GTX Titan Z in 3DMark Fire Strike running at 4K resolution.)
A new reality
AMD is actually sending the graphics card out to developers at universities in a scheme designed to start VR labs across the globe, driving the creation of virtual reality content this year as headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive make their mark.
Another recent AMD rumour from Hardware Battle is that we'll see the unveiling of the Radeon R9 490/490X video cards at Computex 2016 next month with Polaris tech on board.
The rumour mill suggests that these GPUs will go up against Nvidia's incoming GeForce GTX 1070/1080 in terms of performance levels, but there are certainly doubters on that front, which isn't surprising given that Polaris is really focused more on a 'generational jump' in terms of power efficiency (which will be particularly exciting when it comes to mobile graphics, of course).
We will only know for sure when AMD takes the wraps off these new GPUs – the company has been playing its graphics cards pretty close to its chest of late.
Via: Guru3D
