AMD Announces Next Generation Radeon R7 and R9 Video Cards
by Ryan Smith on September 25, 2013 4:40 PM EST
At AMD’s 2014 GPU Product Showcase, AMD has just announced their upcoming next generation product lineup. In an unusual move they’re announcing a complete top-to-bottom of products at all once, rather than announcing products piecemeal as they’re ready for launch.
The upcoming generation of products will be branded R7 and R9. R7 will be AMD’s lower-end mainstream parts, while R9 will be for their higher-end enthusiast parts.
Notably, AMD is taking care to note that certain features are only available on certain cards. The R9 series is Direct3D 11.2 compliant, for example, but the R7 was not mentioned as being so. Meanwhile R7 260X, R9 290, and R9 290X will have new audio features (more on that later), but not R9 270X or R9 280X. So it’s likely that some of the chips in this stack are rebadged/rebranded Southern Islands (7000 series) parts, though it’s not clear which are what.
The flagship of the new family will be the R9 290X. AMD isn’t releasing the full specs for it at this time, though they’re quoting 5 TFLOPs of GPU performance. It will come with 4GB of memory, with a total memory bandwidth of over 300GB/sec, which assuming a 512bit memory bus would put memory clockspeeds at equal to or greater than 4.7GHz. Unlike their other parts AMD is not announcing a price quite yet.
The GPU behind 290X has yet to be named. But AMD has already told us that it has more than 6 billion transistors; this would put it between Tahiti and NVIDIA’s GK110 in transistor count.
| AMD 2014 GPU Specification Comparison | |||||||
| R9 290X | R9 280X | R9 270X | R7 260X | R7 250 | |||
| Firestrike Score | N/A | >6800 | >5500 | >3700 | >2000 | ||
| VRAM | 4GB | 3GB | 2GB | 2GB | 1GB | ||
| Transistor Count | >6B | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
| AMD TrueAudio | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | ||
| Pre-Order Date | 10/03/2013 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
| Launch Price | N/A | $299 | $199 | $139 | <$89 | ||
Below the 290X will be the R9 280X. This will be a card with 3GB of RAM, and it has a price tag of $299. It’s not clear whether this is the same GPU as in 290X or not, and in lieu of specs AMD has given us a single benchmark: 3DMark Firemark, where it scores better than 6800.
Further down yet is the R9 270X. This is a 2GB card with a $199 price tag. AMD is listing a Firestrike score of greater than 5500.
Finally, at the bottom of the stack are the R7 parts, R7 260X and R7 250. 260X is a 2GB card for $139, with a Firestrike score of over 3700. Meanwhile 250 is AMD’s sub-$100 card, hitting retail at $89 with 1GB of RAM and a Firestrike score of over 2000.
Update: Now with official product pictures
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coburn_c - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
Why is there a whole section of this site dedicated to AMD? Has Anand sold out or does he just own a lot of AMD stock?Gigaplex - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
Go troll elsewherehttp://www.anandtech.com/tag/nvidia
HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
The AMD moneyz were too much to be denied? If you can get one of the main review sites that are well known on board with your own section, you're far less likely to see stinging, horrible reviews on that site.How much have you seen Anandtech comment on the 4K fiasco AMD is currenting enduring? Or the CF Eyefinity ails? Wasn't it Anandtech that discounted the frame latency issue for the longest before finally acknowledging there was a real problem?
The moneyz, they are so sweet.
jwcalla - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
To answer the question, yes, AnandTech is taking "moneyz" for this section:"You've landed on the AMD Portal on AnandTech. This section is sponsored by AMD. It features a collection of all of our independent AMD content, as well as Tweets & News from AMD directly. AMD will also be running a couple of huge giveaways here so check back for those."
gochichi - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
This is an exciting announcement, I think it would have been classy of AMD to include to TrueAudio in the entire lineup (from here on out, like a 5 year commitment for example). Instead they're just mucking up the water with yet another audio technology that may or may not be present or supported. It confounds me that 280X, 270X wouldn't have it. C'mon AMD! You told me it was important!Well, shame on me for believing them that audio was important... it hasn't been and still isn't. I bet most of us will make more progress with better speakers or headphones than with TrueAudio or not. As it stands I think the gimmick win still goes to NVIDIA with PhysX.
Nagorak - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
I'm not sure I'd call including it in all cards being "classy". It actually seems more like a smart way to see that the spec actually ends up being emulated.It's also too bad that some sort of cross licensing arrangement couldn't be made for PhysX in exchange for this. The two main PC graphics companies having different unsupported protocols really sucks.
Nagorak - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
That should be implemented, not emulated.Arnulf - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
Except that there are a lot of people posting questions and complaining about AMD being cryptic right here. Go away troll!hojnikb - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
make r7 250 a lowprofile card by default and i'll be a happy person. 7750LP just holds a too big of a premium..lopper - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
The news going around currently is that the R7 250 is an Oland card, and that it has a younger Oland Pro sibling. In any case, firestrike scores of 2000 are to be appreciated. Please correct me if I am wrong.