AMD’s GPU 14 event has taken place and with it they have announce their new line up of graphics cards which will also include a new title for each. The series of cards include the R7 250, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 280x and finally the R9 290X. As the naming suggest we have the lower performing and more affordable end of the spectrum starting with the R7 250 with 1GB of VRAM which will cost around $89 and as we go up we have the R7 260X with 2GB of VRAM at $139 followed by the R9 270X also with 2GB of VRAM at $199 and finally the R9 280x with 3GB of VRAM at $299.
Sadly we don’t yet have pricing for the highest spec’d card which is the R9 290X, but AMD have shared some numbers regarding its performance with us, which include 5 TFLOPS of computing power, 4GB of VRAM with a bandwidth over 300GB/sec and has more than 6 billion transistors. AMD have also stated that the R9 line up will be DirectX 11.2 compliant.
Amd also announced some more interesting stuff coming to their next line up of cards which is AMD’s new TrueAudio processing, which is hardware support that will give users advanced audio effects without using up CPU resources or the need of a dedicated audio card. The new hardware will be included in the R7 260X, R9 290, and R9 290X graphics cards and nope, we have no real information on what the R9 290 card is compared to the R 9 290X.
The last peice of news is AMD’s new programing interface dubbed Mantle, which allows developers to build low-level code into their games and get better performance out of all of AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture based devices, which includes the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The first game to support such a feature will be Battlefield 4 with a patch that will launch in December. The new Mantle interface actually replaces DirectX and should in theory make games more efficient on PC as they are on consoles.
