AMD Announces Fiji-based Radeon R9 Fury X, 'Project Quantum', Radeon 300 Series

MojoKid writes: Today AMD announced new graphics solutions ranging from the bottom to the top ($99 on up to $649). First up is the new range of R7 300 Series cards that is aimed squarely at gamers AMD says are typically running at 1080p. For gamers that want a little bit more power, there's the new R9 300 Series (think of them as R9 280s with higher clocks and 8GB of memory). Finally, AMD unveiled its Fiji graphics cards that feature onboard High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), offering 3x the performance-per-watt of GDDR5. Fiji has 1.5x the performance-per-watt of the R9 290X, and was built with a focus on 4K gaming. The chip itself features 4096 stream processors and is comprised of 8.9 billion transistors. It has a graphics core clock of 1050MHz and is rated at 8.6 TFLOPs. AMD says there will also be plenty of overhead for overclocking. Finally, AMD also took the opportunity to showcase its "Project Quantum," which is a small form-factor PC that manages to cram two Fiji GPUs inside. The processor, GPUs, and all other hardware are incorporated into the bottom of the chassis, while the cooling solution is built into the top of the case.

Comments

The article is useless without benchmarks

[Neo-Rio-101]

There, I said it.

Interesting way to mount the graphics card in the tower case though.

These graphics cards are becoming so bulky, they're just about ready and willing to snap the PCI-express ports with their sheer bulk, assisted by gravity. Perhaps a better question to ask is whether case designers are willing to go along with AMD's proposed redesign?

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[GigaplexNZ]

The water cooled Fury X and the Nano both look to put less strain on the PCIe slot than the previous generation cards.

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[gstoddart]

Bah, I want to know if they've solved the refrobulation problem with the niblitz which was leading to the excess deuterium depletion in the fourth quarter at low revs.

Honestly, as someone who stopped slavishly following hardware specs a very long time ago ... my eyes glazed over half way through the summary.

You guys and your wacky video cards. :-P

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[florescent_beige]

You say "video card" I say 15 years ago it would have been a beyond-top-secret supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore simulating non-linear shock-front neutron transport thingy.

Damit can't you channel your inner gear-head for just one minute?

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[gstoddart]

Oh, don't misunderstand me ... I know you could do more with this video card than you could with ... well, all the technology in 1981.

I have always joked 1GB of iron core memory would knock the Earth out of orbit.

I remember things measured in kilohertz and megahertz, and kilobytes, and megabytes.

And my poor little monkey brain looks at the specs for those things and they're just beyond what I can wrap my head around. I feel like a caveman looking at a CNC machine when I see some of these things.

My inner gear head feels old, and conspicuously lacking in opposable thumbs. ;-)

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[complete loony]

To me, that case layout looks like it was designed for easily displaying and identifying the card in their presentations. Though there are a large number of small form factor cases with some kind of riser / 90 degree bend.

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[florescent_beige]

I too have worked with floppy disks the size of a pizza. And it was cool. At the time.

Re:The article is useless without benchmarks

[hairyfeet]

15 yard penalty, anecdote of a single purchase does not equal evidence, just as your complaints about that ATI laptop from before the sale isn't "proof" that AMD, a separate company, doesn't support their products.

Sapphire offers 2 year warranties on their cards which is pretty standard for the graphics industry and their cards are reviewed highly by their customers with an average of 80% rating 4 stars or better, which again is pretty standard when it comes to GPUs.

And please stop blaming AMD for the fact you got a bad ATI product when AMD didn't even own the company at the time your IGP was sold. AMD drivers are just as solid as Nvidia, they wouldn't sell millions of cards if they weren't, and their support on both the Windows and Linux side I would argue is better because 1.- On Windows its trivial to use the older drivers on the latest version, such as the XP era 2400 Pro cards I have running in many an office building with Windows 7 and 2.- On the Linux side they've opened their specs and are paying the devs to work on the FOSS drivers with the goal of replacing the proprietary driver with a FOSS one. With Nvidia their hostility towards Linux is bad enough Linus flipped them the bird in sheer frustration.

In conclusion...one anecdote does not equal evidence, and one "badly supported" card by the no longer existing ATI (which it was pointed out several times by many people including myself how easy it was to get that card to run on any OS you wanted it to, you blew off any offers of assistance) does not say anything about the current state of AMD drivers in 2015.

shooting themselves in foot

[0111 1110]

I don't understand why the marketing people are so intent on telling us what we must do with their products. This whole 'gaming at 4K' seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot by excluding a huge segment of enthusiasts who are looking for any excuse to find a use for all that power. Why try to only sell your top of the line products to people with 4k monitors? I realize that consoles and just the overall cost of photorealistic graphics have somewhat reduced the need for high end cards, but jeez. At least try to sell high end products. Pathetic marketing strategy.

Re:shooting themselves in foot

[ganjadude]

the summary states that they know most gamers game at 1080P. but it does make sense to show off your best 4K offerings as well.

Re:shooting themselves in foot

[gstoddart]

What do you mean by '4k offerings'? That means nothing to me

Umm ... products (offerings) what do 4K resolution?

Are you implying that the high end cards won't function at lower resolutions?

Nobody is saying that ... but if you're trying to do the marketing of your big shiny product, you do the penis waggling and show off the 4K resolution because it's the new hotness.

People can already get performance for 1080P, so why advertise it?

Re:shooting themselves in foot

[0111 1110]

If you want 4k, you want the 4k offerings.

They are also implying that anyone with no immediate plans to buy a 4k monitor should not buy their high end cards. They are telling a whole segment of potential customers not to buy their products. At least not their high end flaship product. For someone with a video card that isn't that old that means they won't be upgrading until/unless they buy a 4k monitor.

It's very nice of them to be worried about me wasting my money on their products but maybe they should let us worry about that. I don't need them to convince me not to buy their products. I can figure that out for myself.

Minesweeper

[darkain]

But is it powerful enough to run the Windows 10 Minesweeper game?! http://wscont1.apps.microsoft....

Seriously, no joke. The Win10 version of games are horribly resource hungry for fuck knows what reason. In the time it took to just load Minesweeper on the Win 10 tech preview, I loaded up a web browser, played an entire game of mines in it, closed the browser, came back, and it was STILL loading.

I originally played Minesweeper in Windows 3.1 on a 386sx 16MHz. I'm now on a 3GHz quad-core. On raw cycle processing power alone, that is literally 1,000 the speed (this is before accounting for enhancements to the architecture over the past 20 years). And yet the game struggles on modern hardware!? If this isn't the definition of bloat, I don't know what is!

Re:Minesweeper

[_xeno_]

Seriously, no joke. The Win10 version of games are horribly resource hungry for fuck knows what reason.

They are in Windows 8.1 as well. I tried playing Microsoft Sudoku on my Surface Pro 3, but - no joke - it forced the fan on and reduced the battery life to the point where I just gave up playing it.

I'm not sure how Microsoft fucked up their Metro - er, "universal" - versions of their games, but they did.

Recall news

[voss]

Apparently the Leap models with Project Quantum have been having problem with users inadvertently causing time-space distortions including memory loss with at least one user vanishing without a trace.

HBM is a game changer

[Anonymous Coward]

And I say this as a lifelong nVidia card buyer (first card was a Canopus Spectra Riva TNT2, back in the day).

Re:HBM is a game changer

[bloodhawk]

I abandoned Nvidia about 5 years ago after their support and drivers made me want to throw my $500 card against a wall. I sold it and switched to AMD (which hasn't been trouble free either, but definitely better). I was just considering switching back to Nvidia for the lower TDP, but the HBM info that was released earlier this month stopped my purchase. I will wait to see some benchmarks from reputable sites before I decide whether to stay AMD or jump ship.

Re:Wake me up when they stop using 28nm

[ponos]

What is the likelihood that, in three years' time, they have made any significant innovations on the hardware front whatsoever, aside from stacking memory modules on top of one another?

To me this looks like an attempt to continue to milk yesterday's fabrication processes and throw in a few minor bones (like improved VCE, new API support) while not really improving in areas that count, like power efficiency, performance per compute core, cost per compute core, and overall performance per dollar.

They explicitly mentioned 50% more perf-per-watt with respect to the R9-290X. In the end, if you get the performance you want and a reasonable power consumption, what do you care if it's made in 28nm or 22nm or whatever? Process technology is only relevant if it enables these targets.