AMD R9 Launch at E3 2015

AMD has some amazing cards out today, including the R9 Nano and the R9 Fury X (as well as the R9 390X).

r9nano

Wow. AMD R9 Nano. Supposedly 2X performance per watt (and 2 times performance in general) of the R9 290X! It’s also only 6 inches long – literally the length of the PCI-E connector.

Fury X has a 4096bit wide bus. That is stupidly large (remember that is a physical bus, currently the average for high-end is 384bit!).

amdfuryx1

The fury X has 4096 stream processors, comparing to the R9 290X’s 2816, also the stupidly high speed memory. So freaking cool.

The Fury X is also going to cost $649, with the Fury costing $549 in ‘summer’. No pricing on the Nano yet, but I’m sure we’ll know soon!

AMD have just announced loads of new cards. First up is their R9 series. This year they have focused on 4K gaming, performance per watt and form factor – and they seem to have hit it off. The Nano is an awesome card, featuring the new stupid-fast High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), apparently it has lead to a 94% reduction in board size overall. They also plan on putting HBM into APU’s and Servers (and hopefully CPUs too!).

I’ll try and keep this page updated on the news as it comes in!

EDIT: So after a bit of a closer look, it seems to be that AMD’s 390x and down are pretty much just re-brands. They all don’t have their new HBM technology, but are touting their new ‘frame-rate targeting’ software, which effectively limits the output of the card to the refresh rate of your monitor, no matter how many frames the card is drawing/rendering. Cool idea but I’d have to try it to believe it (no confirmation if this will work with older cards yet, but I don’t see why not).

EDIT: fury

AMD’s Project Quantum is a pre-built gaming PC ‘designed to target 4K gaming’, and will be hitting the market in the ‘not too distant future’ apparently. It’s a cool idea but I can’t see many people grabbing one. Something like corsair’s bulldog makes more sense for me, as it will probably be quieter, fit in more places and not look as… Weird. Props to AMD for coming up with it, but that is a terrible name, since I genuinely thought AMD had made a quantum computer (bit of a sigh when I realised it wasn’t actually.. ah well! Maybe at Computex next year!)

EDIT: There seems to be a huge push for VR this year, including from AMD with announced support for LiquidVR, a technology designed to make the VR experience more fluid (ironically) and smoother. It’s a nice touch but again I’m going to hold off on judgement until after I have tried it for myself (sadly I haven’t tried any VR headsets yet!)