Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced the new line of graphics cards at E3 called the Radeon 300 Series. These graphics cards will come equipped with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which – the company claims – will help assist in providing better experiences in PC gaming, at higher-resolution monitors and enjoy a smoother VR experiences with support for newer graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan – AMD’s own OpenGL-derived graphics API.
All are based on its new Fiji chip, which is a tweaked version of the company’s long-standing GCN architecture.
First up is the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, the GPU is the flagship card among the more powerful Fury family and is directly pitted against Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti. AMD is calling the “highest ever GPU memory bandwidth” in the form of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technoloy. With 4GB of RAM, this technology is touted to deliver 60 per cent more memory bandwidth over GDDR5 on a 4096-bit memory interface while supporting 4K gaming. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X will be available starting 24 June priced at $649.
AMD also showed AMD R9 Nano, an air cooled version of the Fury X, but with a shorter form factor and at 100 watts less power. Here is where AMD’s Project Quantum system comes to fore and serves as a concept for those considering new ways of using these graphics cards from AMD.
Other two less powerful members from the Fury family are R9 300 series and R7 300 series
The Radeon R9 300 series aims to bring 4K gaming to users, or for those with less powerful systems, a 4K-like resolution on a 1080p display thanks to the firm’s Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) technology, and CrossFire multi-GPU technology7, a feature which takes advantage of the power of two or more discrete graphics cards working in parallel to improve gaming performance.
The R9 300 series has three cards – The $199 Radeon R9 380 which packs up to 4GB of memory. Meanwhile, the $329 Radeon R9 390 and $429 Radeon R9 390X each pack 8GB of RAM, presumably for a better gaming experience at 4K resolution.
The Radeon R7 300 series graphics card family is made for online gamers and eSports competitors, and is said to deliver 60fps gaming performance at 1080p or 1440p resolutions, even with graphics settings set to “ultra” in most popular online games.
There are two cards in the R7 300-series lineup. The Radeon R7 360 will start at $109 and include up to 2GB of traditional GDDR5 RAM, while the more potent Radeon R7 370 will start at $149 and pack up to 4GB of memory.