With the E3 underway in the US, gaming companies are aggressively launching new products. Microsoft and Sony had a bunch of announcements. The PC Gaming Show, which looks at the desktop gaming platform had some major announcements from graphics card and processor maker AMD. As expected, AMD unveiled its new generation graphics card lineup with the Radeon R9 Fury series being the top liner.
Apart from the flagship Radeon R9 Fury, AMD also launched the R9 300 and R7 300 series with graphics cards priced from $99 to $649 (approx Rs 6,400 to Rs 42,000). Let us look at each of the series in more detail.
AMD has gone all out with the Radeon R9 Fury series bringing in a lot of innovative features on board. The Radeon R9 Fury X is the flagship graphics card featuring Fiji GPU. This will be the first card featuring High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which according to AMD offers three times the performance per watt of GDDR5. You also get a 4096-bit memory interface.
The other unique thing about the Radeon R9 Fury X is its form factor. Measuring just 7.5-inches long it has a separate cooling system. This is thanks to the fact that HBM requires 95% less PCB surface area than GDDR5 memory. It is possible because the memory dies have been stacked on top of each other. This also helps in reducing the overall power consumption.
This reduction in surface area of the PCB can lead to interesting form factors, and AMD has announced the Radeon R9 Nano which will be a 6-inch graphics card offering a 2x performance per watt of the Radeon R9 290X.
The Fiji GPU houses 4096 stream processors and has 8.9 billion transistors. It has a core clock speed of 1050MHz. There will be two variants of the Fury series graphics card – the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury and the other is the water-cooled Radeon R9 Fury X. The R9 Fury will cost $549 (Rs 35,200) and the R9 Fury X will come at $649 (approx Rs 42,000).
The Radeon R9 Fury series is targetted at 4K gaming enthusiasts, as well as those looking to get Virtual Reality headsets for VR gaming. The card also comes with a GPU tachometer, which lets you see the amount of load on your graphics card. For those having a less monitor which has lower than 4K resolution, AMD comes with Virtual Super Resolution, which will lets the GPU render the screen at 4K resolution and then downsample it to your panel’s resolution. AMD Radeon Fury cards will also support Microsoft DirectX 12.
This line up is a replacement of the R9 280 and R9 290 series of cards. The three cards announced in this segment include Radeon R9 380 at $199 (approx Rs 12,800), Radeon R9 390 at $329 (approx Rs 21,200) and Radeon R9 380X at $429 (approx Rs 27,500).
These cards will support 4K gaming, Virtual Super Resolution, AMD CrossFire, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5. Also AMD Radeon R9 300 series GPUs are designed for VR, taking advantage of AMD LiquidVR technology to deliver low-latency VR experiencefor higher possible frame rates.
AMD FreeSync technology which helps with getting a tear-free output for single screen and multi-screen Eyefinity configs, will also be supported by the R9 300 series.
AMD also announced some cards for the entry level segment, specially those looking at mid-range gaming experience on 1080p panels. There are two cards here: Radeon R7 360 at $99 (approx Rs 6,400) and Radeon R7 370 at $149 (approx Rs 9,600).
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