AMD roadmaps from the Capsaicin event in March showed its mid-range Polaris GPUs launching in mid-2016, while the presumably higher-end Vega GPU was supposed to follow sometime in 2017. Rumors flying around the web now indicate that AMD has advanced Vega's launch to mid-October after Nvidia's GTX 1080 announcement.

A lot of sites are reporting the news, but TR did some deep digging to figure out what exactly is going on. We traced the source of these rumors to a couple of forum posts on German site 3DCenter's forums, where user R.I.P. says he expects the new chips to launch alongside Battlefield 1 in October, and cites a post on SemiAccurate claiming the new GPUs have already been shown behind closed doors.

Those are slightly shaky grounds on which to report this news at all, but popular tweaking software AIDA64 was updated with a new beta version today, and the release notes list "preliminary GPU information for AMD Vega 10 (Greenland)," a release that might lend some credence to the rumor. AMD's roadmap suggests Vega will be equipped with HBM2 RAM. The expense of that RAM may indicate that Vega will be a higher-end part that serves as AMD's answer to the the Pascal GPU in the GTX 1080. If those rumors are true, we'll just have to wait until October and see what AMD has in store.