AMD released a new Radeon RX 560 SKU with worse specs, without telling anyone.

Radeon RX 560 with 896 Stream Processors

AMD tends to add ‘xxx SP’ to product names with a different number of stream processors. However, as the report from Heise.de suggests, that did not happen with Radeon RX 560, which received an updated specs on official AMD website.

As you probably remember, Polaris 11-based Radeon RX 460 was released with 896 Stream Processors. A year later full Polaris 11 chip with 1024 Stream Processors was offered as Radeon RX 560. Shortly after, a new variant was released for the Asian market, called RX 560D, which retained the original specs of RX 460 with cut-down GPU.

As it turns out, there are Radeon RX 560 non-D with 896 Stream Processors too, but no one was told about this new variant.

What exactly happened is illustrated in the following screenshots. The official specs from May and December:

The Compute Unit count has been reduced to 14, which means you can now find Radeon RX 560 with fewer cores. The official slide from Radeon RX 500 launch did not mention 14 CU variant:

The issue here is that in order to be absolutely sure which variant are you buying, you will have to compare product codes, as the official name of the card is the same. AMD could’ve easily adopted Asian-only SKU, the RX 560D, which would ultimately define worse specs. Sadly, that did not happen.

AMD Polaris 11 Graphics Cards Dec 12th, 2017 Radeon RX 460 Radeon RX 460 ‘1024 SP’ Radeon RX 560D Radeon RX 560 ‘896 SP’ Radeon RX 560 ‘1024 SP’ GPU 14 nm Polaris 11 CUDA Cores 896 1024 896 896 1024 Base Clock 1090 MHz 1090 MHz 1090 MHz 1175 MHz 1175 MHz Boost Clock 1200 MHz 1200 MHz 1196 MHz 1275 MHz 1275 MHz Memory 2GB/4GB G5 2GB/4GB G5 4GB G5 4GB G5 2GB/4GB G5

Source: Heise.de