14 DAY TRIAL // Weeks after the release of the Radeon R9 200 series and the other Radeon R7 cards, the Radeon R7 260 video board from Advanced Micro Devices has finally reached official availability.
The video board is not the weakest of the R-series, as that honor goes to the R7 240. In fact, it’s not even the second weakest, since R7 250 has that post.
That means that, barring the Radeon R7 260X, the R7 260 is the most balanced in terms of price-performance.
Looking back, it's not so strange to see the R7 260 join the X-version. After all, between the $89 / €89 price of the R7 250 and the $139 / €139 of the R7 260X, the distance is pretty big.
So, the newcomer, with its tag of $109 / €109, will fit quite snugly between those two. AMD didn't actually provide a price, but this is the most likely.
That said, the newcomer is powered by the same 28nm Bonaire graphics processing unit as the R7 260X, only that out of the 896 stream processors, just 768 are active.
The clock frequency of the chip is also lower, at 1000 MHz instead of 1100 MHz, while the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (versus 260X's 2 GB) works at 6 GHz instead of 6.5 GHz. Thus, the memory bandwidth, over the 128-bit bus, is of 96 GB/s.
Needless to say, DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.2 and Mantle application processing interfaces are fully supported, as is AMD TrueAudio technology.
Finally, the maximum power draw is of 95 watts (Radeon R7 260X needs 115W). All in all, the board has what it takes to run today's games, but won't be spectacular if you install graphics-enhancing mods or try too many image enhancements, at least on contemporary titles.
Sales of the AMD Radeon R7 260 will begin next month, January 2014.