After rumors suggested a launch sometime in the second quarter of 2015, it looks like AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) will unveil its R9 300 series at Computex, which is being held in the month of June in Taipei. The vendor had initially planned to launch the R9 390 series as a rebrand of the R9 280 series with improved performance, but those plans have been shelved in favor of an entirely new lineup of GPUs.
AMD’s next-gen GPU –likely the R9 390X — was on hand at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this week, with the R9 390X powering an Oculus Rift demo. The idea of a full rebrand makes sense as an AMD engineer was quoted as saying that all R9 300 series products will come with FreeSync support, a feature that was not available in mid-tier R9 200 series cards like the R9 270X. Only the Hawaii-based GPUs such as the R9 290 and R9 290X as well as the R9 285 offer FreeSync support.
According to a series of leaks, the R9 380X and R9 390X will be powered by the Fiji XT GPU, which is said to feature 4096 stream processors as well as 4GB of High-Bandwidth Memory, offering thrice as much bandwidth as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980. Fiji XT is claimed to be 45% faster than the Hawaii-based R9 290X, and is said to incorporate a closed loop cooling solution, much like the R9 295X2. The Fiji XT GPU has been in testing for a few months in AMD’s driver certification division in India, and the brand itself stated that it was putting the final touches on the card.
With all the advances made by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) with the Maxwell architecture — including significant reductions in power consumption — it should be interesting to see how AMD’s next-generation offerings fare.
