AMD Announces Radeon R9 and R7 Graphic Cards

AMD has announced the latest generation of the GPUs. The new product series have gotten a new branding that forgo the HD branding. Instead, the upcoming cards will be branded as Radeon R7 for mainstream and budget models and the R9 for the performance and enthusiasts models.

The R9 series will be DirectX 11.2 compatible with enhanced energy efficiency. While AMD has not disclosed any specification on the card, it has stated that the top of the line GPU will deliver 5 TFLOPs of performance, 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth, calculate 4 billion of triangle per second, and has more than 6 billion of transistors.

The top model Radeon R9 290X will come with 4GB memory and a new heatsink design. The card will be available pre-order starting on October 13, 2013 but AMD has not announced the pricing yet.

Below the R9 290X is the R9 280X. The card will come with 3GB of memory. While no pricing is given on the flagship card, the price for R9 280X is quote at $299. The card is quoted to deliver greater than 6800 points in the 3DMark Firemark benchmark.

For the R7 series, AMD has announced three cards: the R7 250, R7 260X, and R7 270X. They will be retailed at less than $89, $139, and $199 respectively. While the R7 250 will have 1GB of memory, the two higher models will have 2GB of memory. For the relative performance, the R7 250 delivers greater than 2000 points, the R7 260X delivers greater than 3700 points, and the R7 270X delivers greater than 5500 points in the 3Dmark Firemark benchmark.

Among the new feature is the TrueAudio that “empowers game developers with a programmable audio pipeline on the GPU”. It is aimed to “enabled games can feature more realistic environmental dynamics, a richer tapestry of sound effects, breathtaking directional audio and more.”

Source: AMD