Radeon R9 280 was announced on March 4, 2014. With a launch price of $299, it is based on the Tahiti XTL chip, being a slightly upgraded, rebranded Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Radeon R9 280X was announced on September 25, 2013. It was the first card to feature AMD's GCN 3 microarchitecture, in the form of a Tonga-series GPU. The Radeon R9 285 was announced on Augat AMD's 30 years of graphics celebration and released September 2, 2014. A limited " Battlefield 4 Edition" pre-order bundle of R9 290X that includes Battlefield 4 was available on October 3, 2013, with reported quantity being 8,000. R9 290 and R9 290X will support AMD TrueAudio, Mantle, Direct3D 11.2, and bridge-free Crossfire technology using XDMA.
The R9 290 is based on AMD's Hawaii Pro chip and R9 290X on Hawaii XT. The Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X were announced on September 25, 2013. The Radeon R9 290X, codename "Hawaii XT", was released on Octoand features 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 512- bit wide buses, 44 CUs (compute units) and 8 ACE units. The R9 295x2 has essentially two R9 290x (Hawaii XT) GPUs each with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM. At 11.5 teraflops of computing power, the R9 295X2 was the most powerful dual-gpu consumer-oriented card in the world, until it was succeeded by the Radeon Pro Duo on April 26, 2016, which is essentially a combination of two R9 Fury X (Fiji XT) GPUs on a single card. It is the first reference card to utilize a closed looped liquid cooler. Press samples were shipped in a metal case.
The Radeon R9 295X2 was released on April 21, 2014.
Vulkan 1.2 requires GCN 2nd gen or higher with the Adrenalin 20.1 and Linux Mesa 20.0 drivers and newer.ĭesktop models Radeon R9 295X2
For OpenCL 2.1 and 2.2 only Driver Updates are necessary with OpenCL 2.0 conformant Cards.ĪPI Vulkan 1.0 is supported for all GCN architecture cards. OpenCL 2.0 is supported with GCN 2nd Gen. Open CL 1.0 to 1.2 are supported for all Chips with Terascale and GCN Architecture.
OpenCL accelerates many scientific Software Packages against CPU up to factor 10 or 100 and more. VSR can run at a resolution upwards of 2048 x 1536 at a 120 Hz refresh rate or 3840 x 2400 at 60 Hz. Virtual super resolution is similar to Dynamic Super Resolution, a feature available on competing nVidia graphics cards, but trades flexibility for increased performance. This process is an alternative to supersampling which is not supported by all games. Each frame is then downsampled to native resolution. This feature allows users to run games with higher image quality by rendering frames at above native resolution. Starting with the driver release candidate version v14.501-141112a-177751E, officially named as Catalyst Omega, AMD's driver release introduced VSR on the R9 285 and R9 290 series graphics cards.
This provides a useful upgrade option for anyone who owns an existing Radeon HD card and has a CrossFire compatible motherboard. For example, the Radeon HD 7770 and Radeon R7 250X both use the 'Cape Verde XT' chip so have identical specifications and will work in CrossFire mode. Since Q2 of 2018 availability of AMD GPUs as well as pricing has, in most cases, returned to normal.īecause many of the products in the range are rebadged versions of Radeon HD products, they remain compatible with the original versions when used in CrossFire mode. This led to limited supply and huge price increases of up to 164% over the MSRP in Q4 of 2013 and Q1 of 2014. ĪMD TrueAudio was introduced with the AMD Radeon Rx 200 Series, but can only be found on the dies of GCN 2/3 products.ĪMD's SIP core for video acceleration, Unified Video Decoder and Video Coding Engine, are found on all GPUs and supported by AMD Catalyst and by the free and open-source graphics device driver.ĭuring 2014 the Radeon R9 200 series GPUs offered a very competitive price for usage in cryptocurrency mining. These are implemented by emulation on some TeraScale (microarchitecture) GPUs. OpenGL 4.x compliance requires supporting FP64 shaders.TeraScale 2 (VLIW5) (Northern Islands or Evergreen) is found on R5 235X and below branded products.Graphics Core Next 2 (Sea Islands) is found on R7 260 (Bonaire), R7 260X (Bonaire XTX), R9 290 (Hawaii Pro), R9 290X (Hawaii XT), and R9 295X2 (Vesuvius) branded products.Graphics Core Next 3 (Volcanic Islands) is found on the R9 285 (Tonga Pro) branded products.
Non-disclosure agreements were lifted on October 15, except for the R9 290X, and pre-orders opened on October 3. The Rx 200 series was announced on September 25, 2013, at the AMD GPU14 Tech Day event.