AMD Radeon's long tail of products based on the ageing Polaris architecture adds another ligament this week as a new SKU intended for the Chinese market was revealed. Billed as the Radeon RX 560 XT, it's yet another design based on the Polaris 20 GPU (which in tern was a derivative of 'Polaris 10' AKA RX 400-series) that makes valuable use of so-called 'salvaged' GPUs not quite up to the quality and performance required of the top-end variant.

As you might expect, the RX 560 XT is something of a half-way house between the RX 560 and RX 570, leaning towards the latter over the former. The GPU at its heart will clue you in as to how: RX 560 was based around the Polaris 21, a smaller chip than the Polaris 20 that capped out at 16 Compute Units (1024 shaders) rather than 36 (2304 shaders). With 28 CUs and 1792 shaders the RX 560 XT potentially has more than 50% more horsepower at its command than a vanilla RX 560.

Other aspects of the RX 560 XT are a little more restrained. Base and boost clocks are much more conservative than their siblings, and 4 or 8 GB of 6.6Gbps VRAM could potentially shave a little off its manufacturing cost. Maintaining 32 ROPS and a 256-bit memory bus should see it have plenty of gaming punch for the price.

Specifications (ref)



This news comes via Anandtech, who state that Sapphire will be a key manufacturer of this particular SKU. Like the RX 580 2048SP, the RX 560 XT is a useful means of extracting value from 'salvaged' Polaris 20 GPUs which aren't capable of operating as a full-fat RX 580 but still have useful performance characteristics.

SOURCE: Anandtech