AMD Unveils New Family of GPUs: Radeon R5, R7, R9 With BF 4 Preorder Bundle

MojoKid writes "AMD has just announced a full suite of new GPUs based on its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The Radeon R5, R7, and R9 families are the new product lines aimed at mainstream, performance, and high-end gaming, respectively. Specs on the new cards are still limited, but we know that the highest-end R9 290X is a six-billion transistor GPU with more than 300GB/s of memory bandwidth and prominent support for 4K gaming. The R5 series will start at $89, with 1GB of RAM. The R7 260X will hit $139 with 2GB of RAM, the R9 270X and 280X appear to replace the current Radeon 7950 and 7970 with price points at $199 and $299, and 2GB/3GB of RAM, and then the R9 290X, at an unannounced price point and 4GB of RAM. AMD is also offering a limited preorder pack, that offers Battlefield 4 license combined with the graphics cards, which should go on sale in the very near future. Finally, AMD is also debuting a new positional and 3D spatial audio engine in conjunction with GenAudio dubbed 'AstoundSound,' but they're only making it available on the R9 290X, R9 280X, and the R9 270X."

Comments

Mantle API

[LordMyren]

Personally I would've gone for a mention of Mantle, the proprietary API they are introducing that sidesteps OpenGL and DirectX. I don't really know what it does yet, haven't found good coverage, but DICE's Battlefield 4 is mentioned as using it, and the description I've read said it enabled a faster rate of calling Draw calls.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20130924210043_AMD_Unveils_Next_Generation_Radeon_R9_290X_Graphics_Card.html

Re:Mantle API

[dotancohen]

It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now,...

There are only two operating systems in widespread use now, so I should go write my new software in .Net and Objective C/Cocoa? There is only one Office Producitivity software suite in widespread use now, so I should release documents in .docx format? There is only one web browser, so I should only test sites in IE and ignore the standards?

The more we entrench the already-entrenched mono/duopolies, the harder it will be to get out of that mess.

Re:without decent drivers

[LesFerg]

Yeah I feel the same way about their driver support, couldn't trust them with too much of my limited gaming hardware budget.
Also, would it be really really difficult for them to hire some decent programmers and produce a new version of Catalyst control center that doesn't have to run on .Net?
Whatever happened to C++ and fast reliable software?

New Family, My Ass

[Khyber]

If these links are to be believed, this is just another rebadge:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Sighting-of-Radeon-R9-280X-Really-a-Rebranded-HD-7970-GHz-Edition-386239.shtml

http://videocardz.com/45877/amd-radeon-r9-280x-rebranded-hd-7970-ghz-edition

http://www.techpowerup.com/191440/radeon-r9-280x-is-rebranded-hd-7970-ghz-edition.html

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/radeon_r9_280x_could_be_a_rebadged_hd_7970_ghz_edition.html

Re:New Family, My Ass

[armanox]

nVidia is famous for rebadging. I'll give an example: the Geforce 8800GTX became the 9800 GTX, and then the GTS 250.

ATI on the other hand, has followed a different pattern. All cards of a series (HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, etc) are based on the same tech. The 6xxx series cards were tuned versions of the 5xxx cards, and I think what's happening is the new R-series cards are tuned versions of the 7xxx series. nVidia does this with their cards now too - the Fermi family (4xx and 5xx) and Kepler family (6xx and 7xx) introduce a chip in the first gen, and refine that chip in the second.

Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement

[Lawrence_Bird]

Using OpenGL or DirectX to 'program' a modern GPU is like using Fortran to program the CPU

Are you saying that OpenGL and DirectX are the fastest? Because Fortran code sure is.

Re:Schlameel, Schlamazel

[SJHillman]

The same thing that happened to the Intel i2, i4 and i6 processors.

Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement

[Guspaz]

So, you're convinced that the slight improvement in performance brought about by a reduction of software overhead is going to completely cripple nVidia? Yeah, sure.

Even if Mantle does produce faster performance (and there's no reason to doubt that it will), the advantages will be relatively small, and about all they might cause nVidia to do is adjust their pricing slightly. The won't be anything that you'll be able to accomplish with Mantle that wasn't possible without it, such is the nature of fully programmable graphics processors.

Game publishers, for their part, will hesitate to ignore the 53% of nVidia owners in favour of the 34% AMD owners. It's highly unlikely that this will cause a repeat of the situation caused by the Radeon 9700, which scooped a big win by essentially having DirectX 9 standardized around it. In that case, ATI managed to capture significant marketshare, but more because nVidia had no competitive products on the market for a year or two after. This time around, both companies have very comparable performance, and minor differences in performance usually just result in price adjustments.

Ignore numbers

[rsilvergun]

just look at the bit rate on the memory bus. Video card manufactures use the mem bus bitrate to limit card performance so that their low end doesn't cannibalize their mid range and high end (ala 3DFX).

128-bit is low end.

192-bit is your mid range card.

256-bit is your high end.

You don't need to pay attention to anything else until 256 bit. After that just sort by price on newegg and check the release date. Newer is better :)

Re:Ignore numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

False. Perhaps this was true in the past, but currently memory bandwidth is tailored to the GPU's processing power - that is, it's the bandwidth the core needs, usually defined by the most bandwidth-hungry scenario.

Bandwidth is not constrained by bitrate alone, but by bitrate and clockspeed - a 128-bit interface at 2 ghz is just as good as a 256-bit interface at 1 ghz. Usually the wider bus is less power-hungry at the same bandwidth, and is therefore preferred.

Also, bitrates of 384 and 512 exist.

Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement

[DarkTempes]

Mantle does sound like good news but they also said it is an open API and so I wouldn't be too worried about Nvidia...they'll just implement it themselves if it's so good.

And Nvidia has been crushing AMD/ATI in the PC market for a while (the Steam hardware survey shows 52.38% Nvidia to 33.08% AMD/ATI with 14% Intel).
Hopefully this will even things out some but I don't see it making OpenGL or DirectX obsolete.
OpenGL and DirectX have so much momentum and market share that game devs are going to have to target and support them for a while yet.

Also, until we get more solid details about Mantle we won't know how good it really is. I am cautiously optimistic but at most this will cause me to delay my next video card purchase until things shake out.

Curious about stability

[PhrostyMcByte]

The idea is that operating systems introduce a huge amount of overhead in the name of security. Being general purpose, they view their primary role as protecting all the other apps from your unstable app. And, lets face it, even AAA games these days are plagued with issues -- I'm really not sure I want games to have low-level access to my system. Going back to the days of Windows 98's frequent bluescreens isn't on my must-have list of features.

John Carmack has been complaining about this for years, saying this puts PCs at such a tremendous disadvantage that consoles were able to run circles around PCs when it came to raw draw calls until eventually they simply brute-forced their way past the problem.

Graphics APIs have largely gone a route that encourages keeping data and processing out of the OS. That's definitely the right call, but there are always things you'll need to touch the CPU for. I'm curious exactly how much of a benefit we'll see in modern games.

Re:Curious about stability

[epyT-R]

1. today's consoles also run protected mode (or architecture specific equivalent) operating systems too. The userland kernel hardware latencies are present.

2. You're complaining about games? Today's operating systems are hardly any better off. There is no way the vendors can vouch for the security of 10gb worth of libraries and executables in windows 7 or osx. The same is true for OSS. Best practice is to just assume every application and system you're using is compromised or compromisable and mitigate accordingly.

3. IIRC that particular carmack commentary was done to hype up the new gen systems. It's largely bogus. I'm sure the latencies between the intel on-die hd5000 gpu and cpu are lower, but that doesn't mean it's going to perform better overall. Same thing goes with the amd fusion chips used in the new consoles. They're powerful for their size and power draw, but they will not outperform current gaming pc rigs..

Re:Today I learned

[Khyber]

You mean today you just crawled out of your hole, considering AMD has all three consoles, and they're about to drop a brand new graphic architecture to the table.

Re:without decent drivers

[MojoMagic]

A couple of problems with this statement:
- .Net is not a programming language. Your comparison is just silly.
- In case you meant to refer to C#, no part of this development process is "point-and-click". In this regard, it is no different to C++ (I develop in both).
- It is not interpreted. Nor has it ever been.
- I think you'll find that the simple programs of "a few dozen lines" that you mention would likely be smaller (3 of lines) in C# than C++. But, again, this is a silly comparison and shouldn't be used in any reasonable comparison. If things like this are a problem, you are just using the wrong libraries; in most cases it has little to do with the language directly.

Re:'MANTLE' was the game-changing announcement

[blahplusplus]

"The difference in performance will be MASSIVE when the rendering features made viable by Mantle are enabled."

I'm sorry but you are full of shit. Memory bandwidth has been the KEY factor in framerates. Not drawcalls. That drawcall bs is propaganda. Transistors > software (provides software developer isn't braindead). Always. The same way CISC was 'slower' then RISC, and the itanium was supposed to be the death of x86 but we still have X86. They found ways around it and to make it faster. Same deal.