Earlier this week, AMD officially announced that their next-generation graphics cards would be branded as "Radeon RX Vega". At the time of the announcement, many were left confused as to the fate of the Radeon RX 500 series, which has been rumored for several months now.
Well according to the ever-accurate folks at VideoCardz, the Radeon RX 500 series still exists, it's just a rebrand of existing Polaris-based RX 400 cards with slightly improved performance. This rumor, partially sourced from Heise.de, suggests the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 will launch on April 4th, followed by the RX 560 and RX 550 on April 11th.
The specifications for these cards won't surprise anyone familiar with AMD's current Polaris offerings. The RX 580 is essentially identical to the RX 480, except with a boost clock speed increase from 1266 to 1340 MHz, according to VideoCardz. This results in an extra 300 GLFOPS of FP32 performance, or a six percent performance improvement.
As you might have guessed, the RX 570 is reportedly an RX 470, except clocked at up to 1244 MHz instead of 1206 MHz. The RX 570 will also get slightly faster memory (7 GHz rather than 6.6 GHz). The RX 560 is expected to be an RX 460 with 1024 stream processors, although VideoCardz says that's "unconfirmed", plus a clock speed boost from 1200 to 1287 MHz.
Not much is known about the Radeon RX 550, which will be the cheapest and least powerful card in AMD's RX 500 line-up. VideoCardz suggests this graphics card will "most likely" be equipped with a new Polaris 12 low-end GPU and compete in the sub-$100 market.