Last night AMD kicked off their E3 event by spending a fair amount of time going through what they see as the future of 4K and VR gaming, e-Sports and DX 12. On show they had their “new” R9 300 series as well as a few leading game developers talking about how they can leverage AMD hardware to take advantage of the new DX 12 API and features associated with their LiquidVR software library. To be completely honest the whole thing merely felt like one long extended preamble of the main event–the eventual announcement of their Radeon R9 Fury lineup of cards Before that piece of officialdom rained down, AMD got to talking about their “new” 300 series, and I could feel through the screen as many who know GPUs cringed as they tried to repackage older Hawaii, Pitcairn and Tonga GPUs and dress them up for the needs of their vision of the current market, primarily eSports, Virtual Reality and 4K gaming.
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They also revealed that the new range of AMD graphics cards will also support their new features, such as Asynchronous Shaders, Framrate Target Control, VSR and Direct X 12, although on that front the type of feature level DX 12 support for the 300 series was conspicuously absent. To be honest, most of the information about the 300 series was pretty much known a few days ago, with most of their prices pretty accurate in that leak.
Graphics Card
GPU
CU / SP
GPU/Memory Clock Speed
Memory
Interface
Memory Bandwidth
MSRP
Fury X
FIJI XT
64 / 4096
1050/500 MHz
4 GB HBM
4096bit
512 GB/s
$649
Fury
FIJI Pro
56 / 3584
1000/500 MHz
4 GB HBM
4096bit
512 GB/s
$549
R9 390X
Hawaii XT
44 / 2816
1050/1500 MHz
8GB GDDR5
512bit
384 GB/s
$429
R9 390
Hawaii Pro
40 / 2560
1000/1500 MHz
8GB GDDR5
512bit
384 GB/s
$329
R9 380
Tonga Pro
28 / 1792
970/1375 MHz
4GB GDDR5
256bit
176 GB/s
$199+
R9 380
Tonga Pro
28 / 1792
970/1375 MHz
2GB GDDR5
256bit
176 GB/s
$199
R7 370
Pitcairn Pro
16 / 1024
975/1425 MHz
4GB GDDR5
256bit
182 GB/s
$149+
R7 370
Pitcairn Pro
16 / 1024
975/1425 MHz
2GB GDDR5
256bit
182 GB/s
$149
R7 360
Tobago Pro
12 / 768
1000/1750 MHz
2GB GDDR5
128bit
112 GB/s
$109
To kick off their 300 series, AMD started from the bottom and revealed their cheaper R7 360 and R7 370 cards as low budget gaming cards; you might find it interesting to note that the Pitcairn Pro GPU in the R7 370 must be the longest running gaming orientated GPU to ever be re-used, possibly even outstripping the immortalised G92 chip found in the 8800GT. Pitcairn was originally released in December 2011, which when December comes rolling around, makes the chip 5 years old. The differences to that earlier card is that this rendition comes with either 2GB or 4GB, and are priced quite competitively to stick it to Nvidia’s GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750.
Next up we have AMD’s newest rebrand, the R9 380, a card we saw in the R9 285 Tonga based GPU released last year. AMD were kind enough to provide this version with 4GB, which should eek out better results at higher resolutions like 1440P. The regular 2GB version will be priced at $199 and is targeting the GTX 760, and seems to be able to hold its own against it.
Making up the last of the R9 300 series, we find the R9 390X and R9 390, which have been given the 8GB treatment. When these cards were being announced AMD spoke of 8GB of GDDR5 as essential for 4K gaming. If you want to get an idea of their performance one need only look at 8GB R9 290X. The only issue I forsee is something I spoke about already-the pricing of the R9 390X might just be too high, while the GTX 970 is priced much lower and most likely still has the edge when it comes to raw frame rates at 1080P, and might be a few frames slower at 4K–something the massive price difference will take into account. Once reviews start releasing it might show something different, but if this is anything to go by, the R9 390X is merely an overclocked R9 290X 8GB model.
Of more interest is the R9 390 GPU, which at a $100 cheaper than the R9 390X, might be able to offer some really great price/performance gains over the GTX 970, especially at higher resolutions. At 4K there is not much between the R9 290 and the GTX 970, and playable 4K gaming with one of those is not going going to cut it. It’s here were gamers running 4K resolutions have the option of going crossfire–instead of being stuck with a GTX 970 SLI setup with only 3.5+5GB vRAM, going crossfire with 8GB of juicy GDDR5, the R9 390 CFX setup might be extremely attractive.
Then the conference got boring again, as AMD spoke with game developers about how to leverage AMD hardware for Virtual Reality and DX12, with an interesting bit about rendering out brain activity using Liquid VR and AMD graphics cards
After snoozing for about 10 minutes I perked up as they started talking about the limits of memory bandwidth for advancing modern gaming, alluring to needing new technology. Then Lisa Su, in the best Oprah styled shout talking I’ve seen in a while, officially announced the Radeon Fury X, even though it was pretty much sitting on stage since the press even began!
The Radeon Fury X is officially the new high-end GPU solution from AMD, packing in 4096 GCN cores, 64 Compute units and 8.9 billions transistors. It is also water-cooled by a 120mm radiator, while the cut down Radeon Fury containing 3584 GCN cores and 56 Compute units is air-cooled. This is what AMD envision to be their answer to providing 4K and VR gaming, although without any benchmarks or reviews, we’re still holding back our judgement. Still, you cannot deny them the honour of being the first to market with an HBM powered graphics processing unit. Now instead of offering an actual raw frame rate performance estimate over the “outgoing” R9 290X, AMD claim Fiji has 1.5X the performance per watt over the R9 290X.
Next up Lisa was teeming with pride as she showed off their small 6″Mini-ITX Fury Nano, which is a HBM Radeon R9 Fury, which she says offers 2X the performance per watt over the R9 290X.
This Nano card should have many mini-ITX builders frothing at the mouth, and their pining for it is not being eased by AMD as they’ve announced no price for it or concrete release date. Now even though the Nano is the smallest high end Fury card, and possibly the smallest high-end card ever, even the water-cooled Radeon Fury X is only 7.5″ in size, which still makes it an epic candidate in a small ITX case. All this miniaturised high-end graphics cards are thanks to HBM, which you can read about here.
Now many of us expected at least three new cards to be released; the Fury X, Fury and Fury Nano, but what really surprised the audience was Project Quantum, which was AMD’s own small form factor gaming PC which had within it dual-Fiji graphics cores making with 17 TeraFlops of computing power.
AMD were sparse on giving away too many details, but it did tell the audience that the bottom section of the system houses the computing and graphics processing section, while the top half takes care of the cooling, more than likely liquid cooled.
Later on in the day at E3, at the PC Gaming Show, Lisa Su once again returned to the spotlight and revealed what is most likely within the Project Quantum by showing us dual Fiji Chips on a single PCB, which is probably the smallest PCB housing two graphics chips I’ve ever seen.
To end off the Fiji showcase, the only thing left to do was give us the dollar damage; I say damage, but I really think the pricing is quite fair, possibly even spectacular if they are able to outperform the competition–$649 for the water-cooled Fury X and $549 for the air-cooled Radeon Fury. The Radeon Fury X will launch on the 24th June 2015, while the Radeon Fury will be available a couple of weeks later on July 14 2015. Sadly I myself was expecting at least some reviews to release yesterday or at least some sort of performance numbers. I would have gladly taken some numbers mauled by AMD’s marketing department, but all we got were a few words by Lisa Su about the Radeon R9 Fury X running a game at 4K on stage at 45fps. To that end, we’re still left wondering how exactly AMD’s new architecture will perform and how it will stack up against the competition. That being said, to have a dual card getting ready for retail in a few months is two big middle fingers to Nvidia, most definitely giving them some pause for thought, as we’ve not heard a peep about them giving us a dual Maxwell based card. The ball is in the green court.
Check out some of the promotional videos below:
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