During the E3 2015 PC gaming conference, AMD announced their new lineup of gaming graphics cards. The 16th of June, during the event, we had a first glimpse of the R9 Fury, R9 300 series and R7 300 series. We now take our time to analyze what we know of this hardware and how good it promises to be.
All three the new lines will be tailored to support the latest APIs (be them DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan) and AMD promises competitive performance in each of their price range. If you're going to "compromise" for the cheaper R7 300 line, AMD claims you can easily expect 60FPS at 1080p or 1440p on ultra settings on any current online competitive game. Just like its bigger brothers, the R7 300 series will also support Virtual Super Resolution and AMD's Eyefinity, if you're in the game of multi monitor gaming.
Things start to get more interesting when we look at the higher budget hardware. The R9 300 series is the one you'll want to refer if you want to go to the path of the VR, with its support of LiquidVR for a low latency Virtual Reality experience that takes full advantage of the multiple GPUs. AMD boasts "unparalleled 4K gaming experiences in their class" for R9 300 graphics cards, with full support of Crossfire, Eyefinity and Freesync, to offer a smooth experience.
With the R9 Fury X, the final result of the "Fiji" project, AMD starts taking out the big guns (as we have already seen). In addition of offering everything the lower tiers do (support for 4K, LiquidVR, Eyefinity etc.) with the Fury Series, AMD puts on the market for the first time its HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) technology, offering, they claim, the highest GPU memory bandwidth ever. It supposedly delivers more than 3x the performance per watt of GDDR5 in 94 percent less PCB surface area. Not a small claim, but a really interesting one. On the design side, the Fury is very compact, giving a lot of space for modders and DIYers to tinker with it. It also promises to be a joy for the eyes, with "black-nickel aluminum exoskeleton and soft-touch aluminum plates, high-caliber liquid cooling, customizable GPU Tach activity meter that measures GPU utilization and LED illumination that highlights design details for the finishing touch".
If the R9 Fury X is a little too much, there's also the plain R9 Fury. Pretty much the same as the bigger brother minus many of the knick knacks. It will be available with both air and water cooling and will come out a little later.
Now let's give a look at the price tags for these beauties:
As expected, the Fury X is not exactly cheap. For what offers it's very affordable nonetheless, even more considering that it aims to be a direct competitor for Nvidia's GTX 900 series. Overall, looks like AMD really wants to keep its reputation of offering competitive prices without compromising on the quality.
- AMD Radeon™ R9 Fury X $649USD
- AMD Radeon™ R9 390X $429USD
- AMD Radeon™ R9 390 $329USD
- AMD Radeon™ R9 380 $199USD
- AMD Radeon™ R7 370 $149USD
- AMD Radeon™ R7 360 $109USD
Whether or not that's really the case, we'll have to wait untill we have the cards in our hands to judge. I do like what I saw until now though.
The R9 300 series and R7 300 series were available to purchase starting June 18th while the R9 Fury X will be available from the 24th of June.
Are you an AMD buyer? What you think of these new graphic cards? Let us know in the comments.
