The products representing AMD's financial backbone are here

Jun 17, 2015 12:42 GMT  ·  By

Amid all that noise caused by AMD launching the Radeon Fury series, the launch of the R7 and R9 mid-thru-performance series went almost unnoticed.

Important, but not as new or revolutionary, graphics cards like the Radeon R7 360, the Radeon R7 370, the Radeon R9 380, the Radeon R9 390, and Radeon R9 390X made their appearance. Although being older, 200 series performance machines, rebranded and given slightly better performance improvements and bigger memories, they are meant to deal with lower-spec Nvidias.

Being aimed at competitive multiplayer games like the MOBAs, the low-spec R7 360 is meant to run "League of Legends" at 1080p and many other games at lower resolutions at 900p or 720p. Featuring 768 stream processors, 48 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory, it’s perfectly capable of running the latest games in medium to high quality at acceptable frame-rates.

Going higher a bit on the performance ladder, the Radeon 370 is apparently also designed for MOBAs, FPS games and MMORPGs at full HD resolution. Packing 1,024 stream processors, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB or 4 GB of memory. The core is clocked at 975 MHz, and the memory at 5.40 GHz (GDDR5-effective), belting out 179 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It's a graphics card meant to compete with Nvidia's GeForce 760 and 780 series at a similar price.

Good prices can win the fight

Coming to the Radeon R9 380, it's basically the perfect balance between price and performance and a perfect bargain if investing in a mid-spec machine to run pretty much anything you need on high settings with normal, playable framerates. It features 1,792 stream processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus, holding 4 GB of memory as standard. The core is clocked at 970 MHz, and the memory at 5.70 GHz (GDDR5-effective), which works out to 182 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The last ones represent the backbone of AMD's main selling graphics cards, the R9 390 and 390X. These are meant to go head on against GTX 960Ti and GTX 980. The R9 390 is designed to play games at 1440p with all eye-candy maxed out, and can even play games at 4K Ultra HD with moderate-thru-high settings. It features 2,560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 8 GB of memory. The core is clocked at 1000 MHz, and memory at 6.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective), with a scorching 384 GB/s memory bandwidth.

The Radeon R9 390X is quite similar to the simple 390 and can play games 1440p at max settings or 4K at playable frame-rates. It has 2,816 stream processors, 172 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 8 GB of memory. The core ticks at 1050 MHz, and the memory at 6.00 GHz (384 GB/s memory bandwidth).

Radeon 390
Radeon 390

Together with these Machines, AMD announced its first driver-oriented frame-rate targeting control (FRTC) that limits your frame-rate for a smoother video experience without any FPS spikes. Limiting a certain game at 60 FPS, for instance, will put less strain on the GPU and will smoothen the gameplay without sudden FPS jumps.

The new graphics cards launches from AMD come also with a functionality that mimics in way Nvidia's DSR. Called VSR or the virtual super resolution, it basically super samples your game to look better on your monitor by amping up the internal resolution.

All this not-so-new lineup, as I mentioned before, is a welcome addition for the bulk of potential AMD clients in China, South America or Eastern Europe where limited performance for a cheap buck is desired to play mainstream games. With its top-tier Radeon Fury making a boom across the world performance-wise, these mid-tier video cards will surely bring the majority of profit for AMD.

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