The latest ASRock GPU roadmap has just been displayed which showcases that the current Radeon RX series graphics cards won’t be replaced with next-gen parts till Q1 2019. According to the reveal (Videocardz via XFastest), it looks like Radeon RX 500 series and Radeon RX Vega series is here to stay for a while but let’s take a deeper look at what this and previous GPU roadmaps have meant.

ASRock Reveals Radeon RX GPU Roadmap Up Till Q1 2019 – No New Next-Gen Parts But Is That Really The Case?

ASRock’s GPU roadmap lists their entire product lineup which includes graphics cards from the AMD Radeon RX Vega and AMD Radeon RX 500 series families. ASRock, a recent entrant to the graphics market, has been manufacturing custom and reference designs based around AMD’s Polaris and Vega GPUs. Their first graphics cards, the Phantom Gaming RX 500 series started to enter retail market in April 2018 and was recently expanded to the Radeon RX Vega series too.

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The current ASRock Radeon RX 500 series comes in four gaming flavors and two mining flavors. The Radeon RX 500 series from ASRock is based around their Phantom Gaming designs which include “X” series for High-End, “D” series for Dual-Fan, “OC” for overclocking and “MK2” for the Mark 2 second generation cards. Their mining series include “M1” single-fan and “M2” dual-fan series. The ASRock Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX Vega cards are based on the reference design and not much to be seen there as demand is driving sales for these cards, custom models or not.

The ASRock MK2 variants are expected to hit the market soon and will be a slightly more refined version of the current RX 500 series cards with better heatsinks and cooling solutions from what was seen at Computex.

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Now back to the roadmap, it lists these cards up till Q1 2019 which may hint that there are no new cards coming from AMD up till late Q1 2019 or even Q2 around the mid of 2019. But there’s a very different perspective on this roadmap. We have seen roadmaps that didn’t mention any new cards and only current cards up till a certain date but then, all of a sudden, there was a new launch that happened in between the time frame of that roadmap.

Companies usually showcase roadmaps to the public which only show current products. They also keep internal roadmaps which show an expected timeframe of when the next-gen or updates to the product line would launch. If ASRock was to show a next-gen product in their roadmap which may launch before Q1 2019, they would get in trouble with AMD as it would be a breach in NDA with AMD as the parent company hasn’t yet revealed a next-gen part, nor mentioned an exact launch date.

AMD has only mentioned that they are bringing 7nm Radeon RX to gamers at their Computex 2018 press conference, aside from that, there’s nothing officially told. If we go back a few years, NVIDIA showcased a roadmap for the GeForce 700 series cards, mentioning GTX 780 as the flagship part till fall 2013, however, they introduced GTX 780 Ti in the same year in fall 2013.

As for the Radeon GPU side, there have been rumors about a Polaris 30 update in fall of 2018 followed by mid-range Navi 7nm cards sometime in 2019. Again, these are rumors but I hope it clears out how these public roadmaps work compared to internal roadmaps.

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