AMD and NVIDIA’s latest desktop GPUs to arrive by end of 2016

We’ve talked at length about NVIDIA’s upcoming enthusiast-grade Pascal architecture, as well as all of the hyper efficiency and absurd performance it promises. You can find our latest piece on Pascal here, but there’s a couple more besides.

Now, we’ve heard that Pascal may very well launch in the second half of this year. That’s according to a rumour by Korean publication DigitalTimes – thanks KitGuru.

It’s good news for the green camp, but what news is there from AMD? Not much, actually.

AMD, unfortunately, hasn’t gotten quite as much coverage as NVIDIA simply because they’ve been fairly tight lipped about their enthusiast architecture (formerly Greenland), meant to compete with Pascal. All we do know is that it’s now called Vega 10.

Perhaps that’s because they don’t want Vega 10 drawing interest away from the R9 Fury X2, their dual Fiji XT-powered card, which is apparently been delayed nearer to the latter half of the year to coincide with the launch of virtual reality headsets like the Vive and Oculus Rift.

AMD has shared a little about their entry-level Polaris architecture, but they’ve yet to share much of anything else.

That said, AMD has just confirmed that at least two Polaris cards will launch this year, both of which will most likely cater to the casual user.

What we will say about Vega 10 is that if Polaris is promising the biggest performance jump in several generations for AMD, relative to its cost and entry point into the market of course, then Vega 10 should be something special.