Manufacturer: HIS Price: $ US Author: Steven Walton Date: 06/18/2015

[ Introduction ]

Today AMD is announcing the Radeon 300 series and with that announcement comes the Radeon R9 390X, R9 390, R9 380, R7 370 and R7 360. Despite the new names they are all familiar products from AMD’s previous line-up and their disguise, faster memory. The real strike-force is still yet to come, but for now let’s see how AMD is shaking things up... AMD made great strides back in January of 2012 when it released the first GPU to use the GCN architecture. Codenamed ‘Tahiti XT’ that GPU was the Radeon HD 7970, it was built using 4.3 billion transistors squeezed into a 352 mm2 die. This allowed for 2048 cores and a fill rate of 32 Giga-pixels per second. After a long 22 month wait AMD re-released the Radeon HD 7970 as the Radeon R9 280X giving it a familiar codename ‘Tahiti XT2’. Performance wise they were virtually the same. In fact due to a reduction in clock speeds the R9 280X was slightly slower, reducing the fill rate to 27.2GP/s. A year later AMD spat out their final Radeon 200 series graphics card, the Radeon R9 285 ‘Tonga Pro’. Neither the performance nor the price was noteworthy and instead it was this GPU’s adoption of the latest GCN 1.2 architecture that raised eyebrows, though truth be told very few eyebrows were actually raised. Therefore the only products that made the Radeon 200 series worth remembering were the Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X. They took the same GCN 1.1 architecture and expanded the die to include more cores and a wider memory bus. With the GCN 1.2 architecture providing no real performance over the first two versions we had wondered what AMD’s next move would be, after all it has now been three and a half years since GCN was first introduced. Unsurprisingly that next move was to push out yet another range of new Radeon GPU’s that aren’t actually new at all. Since this first lot of Radeon 300 series GPU’s are re-branded products AMD is quickly ripping the band aid off by releasing them all together, opposed to slowly dribbling them out over the next few months. Today we have the Radeon R9 390X, R9 390 and R9 380, along with a few lower end models such as the R7 370 and R7 360. The Radeon R9 390X is the R9 290X with twice the VRAM (unnecessary) clocked a bit higher and a slight core frequency bump. On paper this means a 5% increase in GP/s and a 20% greater memory bandwidth. The plain R9 390 is much the same, it is a clone of the R9 290 with twice the VRAM along with higher core and memory clock speeds. Then we have the R9 380, which as you guessed, is the R9 280 with a few minor upgrades. This means performance wise the R9 380 should essentially be no faster than the 3.5 year old Radeon HD 7950 as they both feature the same core configuration. The R9 380 has a core and memory clock speed advantage but it also suffers from one major disadvantage, which we will get to shortly. That being said, let’s take a quick look at the ‘new’ Radeon family.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< HIS Radeon R9 390X HIS Radeon R9 390 HIS Radeon R9 380 Test System Specs Benchmarks: Crysis 3, Battlefield Hardline Benchmarks: Dying Light, Grand Theft Auto V Benchmarks: Metro Redux, Sleeping Dogs Benchmarks: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, WATCH_DOGS Power Consumption & Temperatures Final Thoughts Next Page ->

ProX	Posted on: 06/18/2015 10:25 PM I guess we wait now for the Fury.

Pliskin

Posted on: 06/26/2015 01:25 PM Pimped out looking cards!

Jaron

Posted on: 08/23/2015 06:24 PM You're wrong on one important aspect. The 285, and thus 380, are not re-spins on the 7950/280. They are whole new chips based off the Hawai'i chip in the 290/X. The shader count may be the same, but the resources are very differently arranged. Check here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-285-tonga,3925.html "Despite what its specifications may suggest, Tonga is not a spin on the Tahiti GPU in the Radeon R9 280 and 280X. Rather, it is a new and condensed version of the Hawaii GPU in the Radeon R9 290 and 290X. Among other things this means it has four times the number of asynchronous compute engines, that's eight instead of the Radeon R9 280/280X's two. According to AMD this can improve tessellation performance from two to four times, and facilitates effects that rely on GPU compute. In addition, the Radeon R9 285 inherits the 290 series' quad-shader layout, allowing four primitives to be rendered per clock cycle instead of two. Also note the CrossFire XDMA block, which provides the possibility of multi-card operation without a bridge connector. Tonga features four shader engines, each carrying seven compute units (CUs). Just like previous GCN-based GPUs, every CU is host to 64 shaders and four texture units, adding up to a total of 1792 shaders and 112 texture units in the Radeon R9 285. These numbers are equal to the cut-down Tahiti chip in the Radeon R9 280, but the arrangement of resources is different." It also has a different transistor count, different FP64, and supports True Audio where the 280 did not.

ProX	Posted on: 08/24/2015 10:30 AM @ Jaron - YAWN!