We'll see a major leap later this year, with a shiny new architecture called Polaris on a whole new 14nm manufacturing process.
That means AMD was either holding one piece of ammunition in reserve, or waiting for yields to improve to the point that it would be able to ship significant quantities of flawless GPUs.Īs we stated in our review of the Radeon R9 380, AMD has been happy tweaking and renaming its Rx 200 series GPUs for the Rx 300 generation, many of which were in turn tweaked versions of the Radeon 7xxx series. The R9 380X is based on the same "Tonga" GPU as the Radeon R9 380, but without parts of it disabled a common practice called "binning" which lets companies sell imperfect chips by building in some redundancy. It slots in with the rest of the 300-series quite nicely, leading us to believe that it was always a part of AMD's strategy, not an afterthought or strategic reaction. Officially launched in late 2015, the R9 380X comes to us much later than its siblings. Before we get to that though, let's take a close look at the performance characteristics of the GPU and the sample graphics card that AMD has sent us. That's definitely going to factor into our opinion of any product based on the new R9 380X. However, AMD's pricing for graphics cards in India is generally inflated, compared to Nvidia's. 26,000 which leaves a lot of room to be exploited. 16,500 and those based on the 970 can be had for around Rs. Cards based on the GTX 960 retail starting at around Rs.
However, the two are still evenly matched when it comes to performance, mainly because AMD has been clever about optimising its hardware and drivers to squeeze out more performance with each revision.ĪMD has also been quite smart about identifying gaps in Nvidia's lineup, such as with the recent launch of the Radeon R9 380X GPU, which specifically targets the space between the GeForce GTX 960 and GeForce GTX 970.
The struggling chipmaker has been making iterative improvements to the same architecture for years, while its sole competitor has jumped ahead.
You also get an improved GPU cooler, a backplate and more.AMD's current GPU lineup, the Radeon R 300 series, looks a lot less fresh than Nvidia's. The downside to this is that Sapphire says that it consumes 225W of power up from the 190W seen on the reference card. Sapphire bumped up the clock speeds on this card to 1040 MHz on the core and 1500 MHz (6000 MHz effective) on the Elpida GDDR5 memory, so it’s running a good deal faster than the reference cards. This card is priced $10 higher than the Suggested Retail Price due to being an overclocked version. AMD also says that the Radeon R9 380X supports DirectX 12, TrueAudio, Virtual Super Resolution, Frame Rate Target Control and FreeSync.Īll the usual AMD board partners will be releasing cards, but we were sampled the Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro OC 4GB that is available for $239.99. The AMD Radeon R9 380X reference design as two 6-pin PCIe power connectors and is rated at 190W for typical board power. The core clock speed is 970MHz, but you’ll see many add-in board partners bringing overclocked cards to market well about this clock speed. This is good for 182MB/s of memory bandwidth with the standard reference configuration. The R9 380X has 4GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit bus at 1425 MHz or 5,700MHz effective. Many expected that AMD was holding something back when Tonga first came out and it appears that was true.
The Radeon R9 380X has 2,048 processors, 128 texture units and 32 ROPs all tucked inside the fairly tiny 359mm^2 die. We wonder why AMD didn’t release a fully featured Antigua/Tonga core in 2014, but better late than never right? That means we have a GCN 1.2 feature set card made on the 28nm manufacturing process.
So, the AMD Radeon R9 380X GPU uses a fully featured GPU core that has been around for some time. Some of our readers might recall that the Radeon R9 380 was a re-brand/speed-bumped Radeon R9 285 video card that was powered by the Tonga GPU that came out in August 2014.
The AMD Radeon R9 380X uses the Antigua XT GPU, which is basically a fully enabled version of the Antigua Pro core that was used on the Radeon R9 380 that was released in June 2015. The Radeon R9 380X is touted as being faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 and help fill the performance and price gap in the NVIDIA lineup between the GeForce GTX 960 and GTX 970 graphics cards. VAT for our readers in the UK) will be just what gamers will be looking to purchase this winter now that most of the big name games have come out for the holiday gaming season. AMD is hopeful that this card at the $229 price point (185 inc. Sapphire Radeon R9 380X Nitro OC 4GB Video Card ReviewĪMD launched this week what is likely their last desktop graphics card of 2015, the AMD Radeon R9 380X.