At E3 in Los Angeles, AMD announced its new R7- and R9-300 series graphics cards. Among the new graphics cards launched are the R7 360, R7 370, R9 380, R9 390 and R9 390X. At this launch, AMD did not yet reveal any new details about the upcoming Radeon graphics card with HBM memory, although it did tease its smaller form factor at the beginning of the presentation.
The R7 360 (2 GB GDDR5) is the small form factor GPU (no pricing yet), but the R7 370 (up to 4 GB GDDR5) will cost $149 when purchased in bulk. The R9 380 (up to 4 GB GDDR5), which AMD said will drive 1440p gaming with FreeSync, will cost $199.
It’s a big step up price-wise to the R9 390 (up to 8 GB GDDR5), which will run you $329, and the flagship R9 390X (up to 8 GB GDDR5) will be $429, featuring DX12 and GCN. You’ll be able to purchase the R9 390X on Thursday.
Fortunately, despite all the cards announced today being rebrands, they do support all of AMD’s impressive new features. Among these you’ll find Asynchronous Shaders, Framerate Target Control, VSR and DirectX 12.
Asynchronous Shaders is a different method of handling tasks in the GPU pipeline, where the scheduler can take multi-threaded workloads and merge them more seamlessly for a more effective use of the GPU’s power. You can find more details here.
Framerate Target Control, which abbreviates to FRTC, is a feature that is useful for dealing with games that run at very high framerates. Rather than rendering a super-high framerate, but only displaying a handful of them, the GPU’s clockspeeds are adjusted to deliver the performance that is necessary, and no more. This reduces power consumption, and therefore leads to a cooler and quieter gaming experience.
VSR, which is short for Virtual Super Resolution, is a feature similar to Nvidia’s DSR, where the GPU will render a game at a resolution above that of the monitor, and scale it down with better anti-aliasing in order to deliver a higher-quality image on lower resolution displays.
AMD mentioned that its LiquidVR technology would be especially relevant in the current proliferation of VR technologies. For VR, it is of the utmost importance that images are delivered with high framerates, but more so low latency.
