Some users have had luck in unlocking the disabled shader cores in standard AMD Radeon RX 460 cards, taking the Polaris 11 GPU from 896 SPs up to its full unlocked harem of 1,024. The rumor mongers over at WCCFTech report that Sapphire will be launching a graphics card with a factory-unlocked Polaris 11 GPU. Proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Sapphire's Chinese website has a product page for the "蓝宝石RX460 1024SP 4G D5 超白金 OC," a name that translates to "Sapphire RX460 1024SP 4G D5 Super Platinum OC." The name is a mouthful, but its verbosity leaves little room for misinterpretation. We should note that this card appears to be offered exclusively to the Chinese market for now, much like the AMD Radeon RX 470D and its 1,792 SPs.

The 1024SP card looks a lot like Sapphire's current Nitro Radeon RX 460 card, and sports the same port cluster with DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI-D connectors. Both cards have an identical 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory bus. Sapphire's website lists the fully-enabled card's core clock as 1250 MHz. We suspect this refers to the core's boost clock, as the 896-SP Nitro card has a 1175 MHz base clock speed and 1250 MHz boost clock.

Assuming everything else is equal, the unlocked card has the potential to be up to 14 percent faster than other RX 460 cards at the same clock speed. We'd expect the memory speed to be equally unchanged. Both cards have 6-pin PCIe power connectors, suggesting that their power consumption goes a tad over the slot-provided 75W.

Sapphire doesn't have any information about pricing or availability of the 1024SP in the US. As reference, the 896-SP Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 460 currently sells for $120 at Newegg. If the card eventually lands on these shores, it will have to stick close to that price to have any appeal next to the $170 Radeon RX 470 and its 2,048 SPs.