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posted by takyon on Friday June 19 2015, @12:24AM   Printer-friendly

AMD has launched its 300 series GPUs. The new GPUs are considered "refreshes" of the "Hawaii" architecture, although there are some improvements. For example, the Radeon R7 360 has 2 GB of VRAM instead of the 1 GB of the Radeon R7 260, as well as a slightly higher memory clock. Radeon R9 390X and Radeon R9 390 boost clock speeds and double VRAM to 8 GB compared to the 4 GB of the 290X and 290, but will launch at a higher price than the older GPUs currently sell for. Is the VRAM boost worth it?

While one could write a small tome on the matter of memory capacity, especially in light of the fact that the Fury series only has 4GB of memory, ultimately the fact that the 390 series has 8GB now is due to a couple of factors. The first of which is the fact that 4GB Hawaii cards require 2Gb GDDR5 chips (2x16), a capacity that is slowly going away in favor of the 4Gb chips used on the Playstation 4 and many of the 2015 video cards. The other reason is that it allows AMD to exploit NVIDIA's traditional stinginess with VRAM; just as with the 290 series versus the GTX 780/770, this means AMD once again has a memory capacity advantage, which helps to shore up the value of their cards versus what NVIDIA offers at the same price.

Meanwhile with the above in mind, based on comments from AMD product managers, it sounds like the use of 4Gb chips also plays a part in the [20%] memory clockspeed increases we're seeing on the 390 series. Later generation chips don't just get bigger, but they get faster and operate at lower voltages as well, and from what we've seen it looks like AMD is taking advantage of all of these factors.

More interesting will be the Radeon R9 Fury X and Radeon R9 Fury, which use the new "Fiji" architecture. These will be AMD's first GPUs to ship with 4 GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Fury X is a water-cooled card that will launch June 24th for $649. Fury is an air-cooled version with less stream processors and texture units (lower yields) than the Fury X. It will launch on July 14th at $549. AMD claims that the new Fiji GPUs have 1.5 times the performance per watt of the R9 290X, partially due to the decrease in power needed by stacks of HBM vs. GDDR5 memory.

Later this summer, AMD will launch a 6" Fiji card with HBM called "Nano". AMD will launch a "Dual" card sometime in the fall, presumably the equivalent of two Fury X GPUs.

All of the GPUs mentioned above are still made on a 28nm process.

At the launch event, AMD featured a slide portraying current VR efforts as delivering 2K (1920×1080) per eye at a 90 Hz refresh rate using an ~8.6 TFLOPS AMD GPU. According to AMD, the VR of "tomorrow" will deliver 16K (15360×8640) per eye at a 120-240 Hz refresh rate using a >1,000 TFLOPS GPU:

  VR TODAY VR TOMORROW
Resolution Per Eye 2K 16K
Refresh Rate 90Hz 120-240Hz
GPU Engine for VR 8 TFLOPS >1 PETA FLOP

Additional Links:

Tom's Hardware: AMD Fury X And Fiji Preview
Tom's Hardware: AMD Radeon R9 390X, R9 380 And R7 370 Tested


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by tibman on Friday June 19 2015, @04:46AM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 19 2015, @04:46AM (#198115)

    http://www.logicalincrements.com/ [logicalincrements.com] Best site for building a new computer. Especially if you've been out of the PC building hobby for a while. Made by the same guy who use to do /g/'s falcon guide (if you've heard of it).

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 19 2015, @04:59AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 19 2015, @04:59AM (#198124) Journal

    That really is an excellent guide there. Thanks for sharing it.

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