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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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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larkspur "2gb GDDR5". The R9 280 comes with 3gb. I am also seeing the basic R9 280 going for $215 on Newegg (or $185 with a rebate). I'm eager to see the reviews, but this looks like a good time to pick up an R9 280 if you are looking in that price segment.Reply -
chaosmassive Hd 7970 190 watt version...Reply
Sounds awesome...
Still need to wait review fo e this card to know its awesomenesa... -
Zeroplanetz Just get a decent power supply, stop worrying about watt usage and enjoy the sale prices of the 280's. You'll probably save more getting great deals than being able to lower your power bill by that much. Just my opinion though.Reply -
blubbey "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."Reply
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.
Hd 7970 190 watt version...
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. -
eklipz330 Power savings can lead to higher over clocks, no? I would wait for this over the 280 for precisely that possibilityReply -
army_ant7 Is this an improved architecture or just another variation of the GCN like what could be found on the HD 7790 thus having True Audio and (I assume) actual game Freesync capabilities? That's the real question. If it's the former, then it could very well be on par with the HD 7970 with fewer cores and power consumption.Reply -
-Fran- Need benchies... I'll hold my breath until then, since going by the specs alone, this looks to be under my 7970 at 1.1Ghz by a big margin.Reply
Cheers! -
PsychSC2 With lower price and power consumption, this can be great for the Tonga GPU. It's the same architecture and slightly greater than the R9 280 in terms of net performance.Reply
So presumably, getting an R9 280 or 285 will not have that big of a gap in terms of overall performance. :)