AMD Radeon R9 300 Series Cards Coming In Weeks

By Nathan Kirsch

AMD announced today that they’ll be launching the next-generation AMD Radeon enthusiast graphics card over the next several weeks! Dr. Lisa Su, AMD President and Chief Executive Officer, stopped short of announcing the new graphics card, but we are fairly certain that she would be talking about the AMD Radeon R9 390X!

AMD 2015 GPU Lineup

Today, AMD announced their 2015 Graphics line will include all new AMD Radeon M300 Series Graphics for notebooks. These are shipping in OEM laptops now and partner announcements are expected over the next couple weeks. The AMD Radeon 300 series of desktop video cards will be introduced later this quarter by the AIB’s and will be ready for DirectX 12, VR headsets and 4K gaming. Some of the AMD Radeon 300 series cards for OEM’s are already listed on the AMD website. Some of the cards look like they are rebrands as they don’t have support for Adaptive-Sync as none of the R7 and R5 series cards has support for AMD FreeSync.

AMD Radeon 300 Series Graphics for OEM desktops:

AMD 2015 Lineup

Lisa Su talked about how the AMD Mantle API was about making the hardware easier to use with a thinner software layer to really unlock the performance for PC gamers. Now that Vulkan and DirectX 12 has come out it means that AMD can move along to the next big problem that needs to be solved and AMD sees that VR Gaming is the next area that needs help.

AMD Liquid VR

AMD is trying to create a new way to experience Virtual Reality to ensure gamers can have the best overall gaming experience possible. This is why AMD Liquid VR was announced at the Game Developer Conference in March 2015. AMD have heavily invested into that project and see major developments happening there in the next 24 months. The AMD engineering team has been busy developing Asynchronous shaders to reduce latencies, advanced head tracking and more to enable full VR technologies so people have an enjoyable experience without getting motion sickness.

HBM DRAM Memory

Some of the new AMD Radeon R9 300 Series cards that will be coming out this year will be the first GPUs in the World that come with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). AMD is always working on the next generation technology and AMD sees that HBM will help raise the bar when it comes to performance and help usher in the era of 4K gaming and Virtual Reality.

HBM DRAM

It turns out that AMD has been working HBM for almost seven years as the whole supply chain needed to come together for HBM to come to market. HBM is 3D stacked and is connected with a silicon interposer that is directly connected to the GPU. This allows for an extremely fast connection as you don’t have to go off chip to make that connection! This design is more compact and it requires less power. AMD says that they are seeing 50% power savings and 3x the Performance per Watt versus the GDDR5 memory implementation that is currently used! With the video cards memory now being on-die it frees up space versus being on the PCB it frees up space and will allow for new form factors to come to market.

AMD TENETS

We can’t wait to see how AMD’s HBM-Equipped flagship discrete desktop graphics cards perform in the weeks ahead. Will AMD have a solution that will let them pull ahead of NVIDIA when it comes to 4K and VR performance and how lone will it take NVIDIA to catch up if they need to? We were impressed by AMD’s Hawaii GPU architecture that came out in the Fall of 2013, but we are ready to see what AMD has been working on all this time. Dr. Lisa Su gave us a little glipmse today during AMD’s financial analyst day, but we want more information and of course benchmark numbers!