There are still several months left for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to unveil its newest graphics card, the Radeon RX 490. If not this year, the highly anticipated high-end graphics processing unit (GPU) may be released early 2017.

AMD stirred up a hornet's nest when it included Radeon RX 490 as part of its promotions for December 2016. As per recent reports, the GPU was clearly seen in the list stated in the company's official website. This led to speculations that AMD is gearing for a release soon.

The Radeon RX 490 is slated to be the most powerful graphics card from the California-based technology company. Some of its features reportedly include a computing power of 9,830 GFLOPS, a memory size of 16384 MB and a memory bandwidth of 716.8 GB/s, not to mention its thermal power of 200 W. The GPU is also said to have a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 interface.

Meanwhile, the debate on whether the Radeon RX 490 will feature a dual-GPU Polaris-based chip or a Vega 10 architecture is still ongoing. It predecessor, the RX 480, was based on a Polaris configuration. Since AMD has continuously boasted that its newest graphics card is much more powerful than the other next generation GPUs it has, some say it is unlikely that a Polaris chip will be used in the RX 490. There have been speculations that it will support 4K and virtual reality gaming. If that is the case, Vega 10 will suit it better.

AMD's chief gaming scientist, Richard Huddy, was previously noted in saying that the name of the GPU speaks for itself. The "9" in RX 490 allegedly means that it is a fourth gen card that can exceed 256-bit bus and is perfect for gaming at 4K. As per PCGamesN, this is a huge hint that the RX 490 is powerful enough to play games at the highest resolution levels. Hence, the Vega 10 claims may be true.

The Radeon RX 490 is said to cost $700 but nothing has been confirmed as of yet.