Next Gen Radeons incoming!

AMDs line up of next gen radeons are in the house, well sort of as they aren't available for purchase just yet. But we now know that the names that have leaked over the past few days are official! So what we will be getting is the Radeon R9 290X, that will go head to head with Nvidias GTX TITAN, the Radeon R9 280X that will compete with the GTX 780 and the Radeon R9 270X will compete with the GTX 770. The R7 Series will represent the mid-range and will feature the R7 250 and R7 260X.

The R9 290X is based on second generation GCN2(Graphics Core Next) architecture while the 280X is simply a rebadged Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. I wouldn’t expect anything drastically different in the case of the 280X maybe a slightly higher clock speed and a new cooler slapped on top, but from what I see so far it’s just a HD 7970 with a new track suit. The 290X on the other hand is shaping up to be a titan slayer (get it TITAN slayer.........…...never mind). The 290X sports a whopping 6 billion transistors and has a bandwidth of 300GB per second pumping out 4 billion triangles per second. The 290X will sport 4GB of GDDR5 memory and also signals the return of a 512bit memory interface, reminds me of the 512 bit monsters of the past. The 290X is also the first card to support Direct X 11.2. Unfortunately no info is available on exact stream processor counts but from what I hear it’s somewhere in the range of 3,000.

The R7 250 will be priced at US $89. The R7 260X will come in at US$ 139. The R9 270X and 280X will be priced at US$ 199 and US$299 respectively. Unfortunately no prices have been announced for the 290X as of yet.