![]() ![]() 1080p gaming for $199Īt the bottom of the R9-branded stack comes the 270X, which starts at $199 and is built to achieve playable frame rates at 1080p on the latest games. ![]() The card also comes with the necessary 3GB of GDDR5 (with 384-bit bandwidth) to be recommended for use with Battlefield 4. (A side note: TressFX 2.0 is on its way, which will allow the rendering of 12 thousands separate strands of hair in a single scene.) The underlying silicon in 280X is essentially a tweaked version of the GPU in the current Radeon HD 7970, with 2,048 stream processors that are capable of delivering up to 4.1TFLOPs of compute power and draining up to 250 watts of energy from the wall. Tomb Raider is claimed to run at around 38 fps at this res, even with TressFX hair extensions enabled, versus 28 fps delivered by NVIDIA's GTX 760, based on AMD's official benchmarks. The R9 280X occupies the traditional "sweet spot" in AMD's line-up, promising good frame rates in current games up to 2,560 x 1,440. (But don't pick up anything less than a GCN card if you want to see what Mantle has to offer.) The $299 mid-range Meanwhile, the focus on Mantle, TrueAudio and the various display standards, along with a general reduction in dollars-per-FLOP in the Rx series, will cause older 7000-series cards to be phased out very abruptly - so expect to see some wild discounts in the next couple of weeks. To get around the frame-rate limitation of 4K over first-gen HDMI, AMD is pushing for a new VESA standard to make it easier to set up 4K displays that stitch together inputs from two separate HDMI cables. Regardless of the exact price, it's safe to assume that this card will be geared towards 4K (3,840 x 2,160) and triple monitor resolutions. However, we're guessing it'll be somewhere around the $500 RRP of the current flagship, the Radeon HD 7970. This also happens to be the card with the newest silicon design, since lower cards are based on existing GCN architecture. Moving onto the hardware itself, AMD isn't quite ready to reveal full specs or pricing for its highest-end card, the R9 290X. Indeed, every single one of AMD's new cards, as well as its existing Graphics Core Next (GCN) branded cards, has a direct familial connection to the silicon found in the PS4, Xbox One and (to a lesser extent) Nintendo's Wii U, thereby making it potentially capable of better graphics than its raw specs might suggest - although we'll have to wait a while before we can put this to the test, for example with EA DICE's Mantle update for Battlefield 4 due in December. But now that the company effectively owns the next generation of console graphics, such that numerous developers may end up using Mantle-style code regardless of any explicit intention to snub NVIDIA, the new API starts to make a lot of sense. Mantle would have been dismissed as craziness just a year ago, since AMD lacked the clout to put its own API forward. Finally, the argument goes, Mantle will allow PCs to do more with more, since it's a shallower API that gives developers better access to everything a cutting edge CPU and GPU has to offer. PCs, by contrast, did less with more: they had upgradeable silicon that tended to be more powerful, but they were held back by traditional, GPU-agnostic programming tools like DirectX and OpenGL. The reasoning behind Mantle runs something like this: Historically, in terms of game graphics, consoles have been able to do more with less, because game developers were able to tune their code at a very deep level to the unchanging silicon architecture at the heart of each generation of machine. ![]()
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