02/11/2013
AMD’s new Radeon family of GPUs have launched, with a new set of products, a new brand strategy, long-term plans for the Mantle API, a new hardware audio acceleration engine, and, oddly enough, fundamentally the same GPU core that has powered the company’s graphics cards since 2012.
Historically, GPU enthusiasts aren’t very thrilled with rebrands, but the concept of what does or doesn’t qualify is somewhat dicey. On the grand scale, the R7 260, R9 270X, and R9 280X are all rebadged parts — but that doesn’t mean they don’t include new features.
The new family of R7 and R9 cards are all rebrands of already existing products, with a few new spins and a new feature tucked in here and there. The reason for the rebrand is simple: The old HD family has run out of numbers. The 2000 – 7000 series were used from 2007 to the present day, the 8000 (OEM only) cards are already taken, which leaves just the 9000 before a new set of figures were necessary. AMD has decided to make the jump now, with a combination of models and three-digit numbers.
The “R7″ denotes relative ranking within the family, meaning that an R9 should always be faster than an R7. The next three digits are the model — AMD is starting with the 200 series, so an R7 260 is faster than an R7 250. Then there’s the “X”. Theoretically, the “X” cards are faster than non-X cards. Right now, that’s still true. In the future, AMD will have to design things carefully to prevent customers from becoming confused over whether or not a theoretical R7 280X is faster than an R9 260X. Careful brand segmentation will help here.
What’s new
The 200 family isn’t an exact clone of the 7000 series, even if the fundamental GPU at the heart of the equation is unchanged. Fresh on deck is additional display flexibility — the Radeon 7000 family could only drive two HDMI/DVI displays simultaneously, the third was required to be DisplayPort. Now, you can drive three identical monitors off HDMI/DVI, thanks to new board and firmware tricks that share a clock signal under these conditions. If you’re mixing and matching across monitor types (and to be fair, we really recommend not doing that), you won’t be able to take advantage of this capability.
