During AMD’s 2014 GPU Product Showcase, AMD announced its next-generation product lineup. These GPUs will be branded either R7 or R9. R7 cards will focus on the lower-budget consumer, while the R9 cards will be aimed towards those who crave performance.
According to Matt Skynner, general manager for the graphics business unit, AMD’s plan is “to create a unified Radeon gaming experience across all platforms,” which includes mobile and the cloud, the latter of which is through the Radeon Sky gaming strategy. In addition, AMD’s tools and architecture allows developers to more easily port games from one platform to another, said Skynner.
And what’s important is not that we’re trying to drive the industry from a performance view, we’re trying to put reality on the screen.
For AMD, “reality on the screen” includes technologies such as TressFx, its hair-modeling system, depth of field and shadowing, and the company’s EyeFinity multi-monitor technology.
Speaking more specifically about the R9 290 series, AMD corporate vice president of visual computing Raja Koduri revealed that there are three technology pillars supporting the R9 290 series: the Graphics Core Next (GCN) series, UltraHD (4K resolutions), and audio. The R9 290 series will support DirectX 11.2 games, the first such GPUs to do so. The R9 290 series also offers 5 TFLOPS of computing power. That’s a lot of TFLOPS.
Pertaining to displaying high-resolution content, the R9 290 series has over 300Gbyes/s of memory bandwidth, a threshold that had to be met in order to render high-resolution content. Finally, AMD will launch TrueAudio, which will allow players to listen in on hundreds of channels in a game. In addition, TrueAudio will allow players to hear immersive and directional audio pulled straight from directional data in the game that they’re playing at the time.
In all, there will be five new Radeon GPUs:
- R7 250 (1GB of VRAM/2,000+ on 3D FireStrike benchmark) – $89
- R7 260x (2GB/3,700+) – $139
- R9 270x (2GB/5,500+) – $199
- R9 280x (3GB/6,800+) – $299
- R9 290x (4GB/???) – N/A
Those interested in the R9 290x can pre-order beginning on October 3.
