AMD's RX 490 4K gaming graphics card has made threesurprise appearances. Once on AMD's website and again in an official slide and a third time on Sapphire's website. AMD's largest add-in-board partner for discrete graphics cards.Clues for thisyet unannounced RX 400 series flagship graphics cardwere given first by the company in a slide detailingthe new Radeon RX 400 series nomenclature. Shortly afterwards the very same GPU was discovered on AMD's and Sapphire's websites.

TheRX 490 graphics card, as defined by the company, is a 4K gaming class GPU with a memory interface that's larger than 256bit. That is to say a memory interface larger than what's found on the Radeon RX 480 and RX 470 graphics cards. Which the Radeon Technologies Groupdefines as 1440p class gaming products.

AMD Vega RX 490 "4K Gaming" Graphics CardListed On AMD's &Sapphire's Websites With A 2016 Launch Date & Leaked In Official Slide

AMD's nomenclature slide clearly shows a tier 9 product in the RX 4XX family. Which is the RX 490 graphics card in question. The graphics card is designed for 4K gaming and is configured with a memory interface large enough to cope with the heavy bandwidth demand that this resolution dictates. Interestingly the company has also detailed what the third digit in each name actually means.

In this case the 0 in the RX 480 indicates that this is the first revision of this product. Leaving room in the naming scheme for an updated card with enhanced performance and power characteristics.Whether AMD has an RX 485, RX 475 or an RX 465 in the works isn't confirmed by any means. However if the company chooses to make any, the new naming scheme can happily accommodate them.

The Radeon 400 series lineup will also include 4XX graphics cards without the RX prefex. As it turns out only graphics cards with a compute horsepower that's over 1.5 teraflops and a memory bandwidth of at least 100GB/s qualify.

AMD has confirmed to us that theRX 480 is based on the most powerful configuration of the Polaris 10 GPU. This makes the RX 490 quite the mystery card, because the most powerful configuration of Polaris 10 is already in-use. Although thankfully there are enough clues around that if followed do give us a very good idea of what this graphics card actually is. So let's follow the paper trail that AMD has leftbehind.

AMD's Mystery RX 490, Following The Paper Trail - Is This The Next Gen Vega 10 GPU Or Something Completely Different?

The RX 480 and RX 470 are both based on the same Polaris 10 GPU. The version employed in thethe RX 470 is a slightly cut back configuration of said GPU with fewer GCN stream processors. The RX 460 on the other hand is based on the smaller Polaris 11 GPU. It's crucial at this point to point out that AMD only developed two Polaris GPUs, 10 and 11. Additionally, last yearAMD's Raja Koduriconfirmed to analysts that the company only has two FinFET GPUsplanned for 2016.

Patrick Moorhead - Forbes

Raja also talked about how Advanced Micro Devices’ RTG will need to execute on their architectural designs and create brand new GPUs, something that Advanced Micro Devices has struggled with lately. He promised two brand new GPUs in 2016

AMD's largest FinFET GPU this year is Polaris 10. Although the company does have on additional GPU in the works that has been announced. Vega 10 the successor to the company's flagship Fiji GPU that powered the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury and Nano. And it's on track, we know that because Raja was just celebrating a development milestone with AMD's global engineering team late last month.

Design team is thrilled with your response. Celebrated a milestone with the team. Long way to go before you see it pic.twitter.com/duQVBBGict

— Raja Koduri (@GFXChipTweeter) June 23, 2016

Incredibly proud of our gpu design team here in shanghai that delivered polaris family and next Vega pic.twitter.com/ejvFJW1DoY

— Raja Koduri (@GFXChipTweeter) June 23, 2016

The biggest milestone of any chip's development is tape out. That is when the floorplan of the design isfinally completeand issent to the fab for the very first time to get silicon back to run and test. AMD has already teased the launch venue for Vega 10 since then. So it's without a doubt now that we're getting much closer to the launch of AMD's new Radeon flagship graphics card.

We detailedVega 10 in an exclusive we had published last year. Which included thespecs of the GPUas well as its performance. Vega 10represents asignificant leap compared to itspredecessor"Fiji" which powered the R9 Fury X. It's the most ambitious GPU that the company has ever developed.

Vega 10 Specs