Given the real world performance benchmarks are now out for the RX480, what performance could we expect from a 490 if it was based on a dual Polaris with perhaps a slightly slower clock ? What other thing could take the performance beyond two RX480's in crossfire .. HBM2 ?
How would a dual 480 based 490 compare to an existing 1080 / Titan for example ( not the new ludicrously priced Titan x ) in terms of potential heat, power usage, cost ? When could we see it released realistically ?
if its dual gpu i hope its of a MCM design which would bypass all the downsides of a dual gpu set up making it very interesting. Well thats if its MCM it could be another run of the mill dual gpu on single pcb design which is fine but that crossfire support kills it for me if it is.
actually you can enable physx in borderlands without nvidia. (there's hit on cpu, but isn't that big if you have good cpu)
The skylake and 2011 boards won't have any issues. As far as I tested physX code was fairly well optimized to run on all available cores even if game itself doesn't use more than 4 or 6. (thus if you have 32 threads it'll use 'em all)
If Vega doesn't come late quarter this year then a 490 is a possibility. AMD will use it as a buffer until Vega 2017 in order to have at least something alongside Nvidia's high-end offerings (1080 & Titan XP).
As lame as as dual card would be, in terms of engineering that's were AMD is at their best. Their HD7990, R9 295x and Radeon Pro Duo PCBs are hardware pron art worthy.
Dual GPUs are not that easy to make. Look at how long it took for the dual fury to come about. Fiji is still out there and easily competing with 1070s. Dual 480s are only slightly faster than that but would bring all the usual problems of dual GPUs. I simply don't see a market for that kind of card. And they wouldn't even gain any bragging rights with it because it would not be the "fastest card ever". It just doesn't add up.
It would still be close to flag ship performance... If they priced it right.. It would do well.. But if they price it the same as a 1080 yeah... Chuckle Chuckle... It won't go anywhere fast