The folks at Heise online have put forward a report on how AMD's RX 500 series of graphics cards will be little less than direct rebrands of the Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs that AMD introduced with its RX 400 series of graphics cards. Apparently, a straight rebrand is in order, with the RX 580 entering the fray in the place of the RX 480, the RX 570 substituting the RX 470, and so on. Heise reports that the Polaris 10-based RX 500 should see the light of day as soon as April 4th, with Polaris 11-based solutions coming in a little later, on April 11th.

Videocardz, however, reports that these will be slightly more than a straight rebrand - if you can call a slight bump in clockspeeds as trumping a rebrand. The RX 580 is supposed to ship with base clocks ar 1340 MHz (74 MHz more than the reference RX 480), with the RX 570 carrying a much less significant 38 MHz increase over its RX 470 counterpart. Videocardz also reports on the possibility of AMD introducing a new Polaris 12 GPU with the RX 500 series, which will apparently be an even lower-end part than even Polaris 11.

AMD has had a recent history of following with rebrands every other year, which is disappointing, though these do make business sense. They're just not what we, as enthusiasts, like to see. This approach, however, goes on to confirm a little of what we already knew about Vega, and takes after AMD's approach with the Fiji GPUs - rebrand the lower and mainstream end of the GPU spectrum, whilst introducing a new, high-end design. As we know, Vega is an enthusiast-aimed GPU, and so a RX 500 series being introduced in April does pave the way for AMD to have a complete graphics line-up for 2017, starting from the bottom up - remember that AMD's own announcements put the launch of Vega strictly before the end of June. A RX 500 series also makes sense in regards to branding, since AMD has branded their RX Vega-based cards as simply "Radeon RX Vega", opting for a name distinction between its mainstream and enthusiast-class cards, much like the company has done before with their Fury branding.