AMD Announces R9 285 Graphics Card At Live Event
AMD announced the R9 285 at its "30 Years of Gaming and Graphics" event.
AMD has broadcast its "30 Year of Gaming and Graphics" live event via Twitch, where the company announced the Radeon R9 285 graphics card. This new product is equipped with the Tonga Pro GPU and is intended to succeed the Radeon R9 280, bringing a similar level of performance to a lower TDP and a lower price point.
The GPU on this new card boasts 1792 stream processors, the same number as the current Radeon R9 280. The Radeon R9 285's 918 MHz maximum GPU boost clock rate is slightly slower than the Radeon R9 280's 933 MHz cap, though. On the other hand, the R9 285's 1375 MHz actual/5.5 GHz effective memory speed is notably faster than the 280's 1250 MHz/5.0 GHz specification, so net performance may be slightly faster.
The Radeon R9 285 requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and carries a maximum 190 Watt TDP, which is a good bit less than the Radeon R9 280's 250 Watt maximum draw. In addition, the Radeon R9 285's Tonga GPU supports new features such as AMD TrueAudio and FreeSync technology.
Along with this new graphics card, AMD also announced the Never Settle Space Edition bundle. This expands on the current Never Settle portfolio of games that are available to certain Radeon graphics card buyers, with the addition of Alien Isolation and Star Citizen to the list.
Both the Radeon R9 285 and the new Never Settle Space Edition bundle will be available starting September 2, 2014. AMD had some fun with the live audience by announcing a fake $329 asking price, but revised that to the product's true $249 MSRP.
With similar specifications and an identical asking price compared to the Radeon R9 280, the new Radeon R9 285 doesn't appear to offer any groundbreaking performance advantage over it's predecessor but we won't know for sure until we test an actual card in our labs. There might be a notable difference in power draw though, and we will get you the test result data as soon as we can
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Sounds awesome...
Still need to wait review fo e this card to know its awesomenesa...
Nope, not how memory bandwidth works. It's (bus width * "effective" ghz )/8 or (bus width * memory speed)/2 - in that case, it's usually 1000-1750MHz, effective's going to be 4-7GHz, unlikely you'll see lower/higher than that.. Doesn't matter if the memory's 1.1x faster if the bus width is 1.5x the size.
Sounds awesome...
Still need to wait review fo e this card to know its awesomenesa...
Nope, slightly slower 7950 if I'm not mistaken. 7970 is 2048:128:32@~925MHz iirc, this is 1792:112:32@918MHz. Not to mention the bandwidth difference, 2GB of 176GB/s v 3GB of 288GB/s.
Cheers!
So presumably, getting an R9 280 or 285 will not have that big of a gap in terms of overall performance.
As for those questioning the architecture, unless they did a die shrink to 20nm like they have been planning I don't think they would of managed that big of a power reduction without changing the architecture. Given the major focus on the mobile market now though, they seem to be following Nvidia's plan and working on reducing power consumption while maintaining performance. Chances are this is a GCN2.1, GCN3.0, or a die shrunk GCN 2.0 architecture. Since GCN2 didn't change anything really for the shaders just added some extra features like True Audio DSPs there is no telling how much they have changed.
dont go calling it R9 285 if it doesnt beat 280x.
Support for DX12 is kind of a big deal.
and trueaudio and freesync full support. They seem to be refreshing their old cards with newer features. This also shows that the reason AMD cards have high TDP and heat is probably the wider bus. I guess higher speed VRAM is the better route.
Nope, not how memory bandwidth works. It's (bus width * "effective" ghz )/8 or (bus width * memory speed)/2 - in that case, it's usually 1000-1750MHz, effective's going to be 4-7GHz, unlikely you'll see lower/higher than that.. Doesn't matter if the memory's 1.1x faster if the bus width is 1.5x the size.
Sounds awesome...
Still need to wait review fo e this card to know its awesomenesa...
Nope, slightly slower 7950 if I'm not mistaken. 7970 is 2048:128:32@~925MHz iirc, this is 1792:112:32@918MHz. Not to mention the bandwidth difference, 2GB of 176GB/s v 3GB of 288GB/s.
Now you have said it is slower than HD7950, could you please provide the number/s for comparison?
Now you have said it is slower than HD7950, could you please provide the number/s for comparison?
Both have 1792:112:32 cores, 285 has 918MHz boost v 925MHz boost 7950 . 285 has 2GB 176GB/s bandwidth v 7950's 3GB w/ 240GB/s.
Same core config, slightly slower clock speed, less memory, less bandwidth.