AMD stealthily lowers count of compute units on second wave of RX 560 GPUs

AMD launched the Radeon RX 560 GPU in May 2017 as part of the Polaris 11 family and as a successor to the RX 460. The difference between these two versions is 2 more compute units for the Polaris 11 GPU, which would translate into performance gains of around 12%, at best. AMD then introduced the RX 560D as a regionally-limited GPU with 14 CUs, but the availability of this version was so scarce that the 14 CUs did not really confuse buyers, apparently. As if 2017 did not turn out to be a great year for AMD in terms of sales and profits, the company is now allowing partners and retailers to sell 14 CUs RX 560 cards, without specifying this downgrade in the spec sheet, as noted by the German site Heise.de. Moreover, the official product page of the RX 560 GPU was modified without notice to reflect the downgrade.

Heise.de also notes that the downgraded versions come mostly from OEMs like Sapphire, Asus and PowerColor, which are sold through Amazon and Newegg, and this has been happening at least since the beginning of October. Basically, AMD is now selling its RX 460 GPUs at the same price as the RX 560 models, and is doing this with blatant lack of transparency towards the end users.

Sure, the performance difference is not really jarring and the GPU is part of the entry level offer, so the price difference is negligible. Still, no one would expect this from AMD, especially when they company is back in profit.

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