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The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review

18 May 2014, 10:26
Written by Foxter
Views: 935
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Although the days of AMD’s “small die” strategy have long since ended, one aspect of AMD’s strategy that they have stuck with since the strategy’s inception has been the concept of a dual-GPU card. AMD’s first modern dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 (sorry, Rage Fury MAXX), came at a low point for the company where such a product was needed just to close the gap between AMD’s products and NVIDIA’s flagship big die video cards. However with AMD’s greatly improved fortune these days, AMD no longer has to play just to tie but they can play to win. AMD’s dual-GPU cards have evolved accordingly and these days they are the high-flying flagships of AMD’s lineup, embodying the concept of putting as much performance into a single card as is reasonably possible.

The last time we took a look at a new AMD dual-GPU video card was just under a year ago, when AMD launched the Radeon HD 7990. Based on AMD’s then-flagship Tahiti GPUs, the 7990 was a solid design that offered performance competitive with a dual card (7970GHz Edition Crossfire) setup while fixing many of the earlier Radeon HD 6990’s weaknesses. However the 7990 also had its shares of weaknesses and outright bad timing – it came just 2 months after NVIDIA released their blockbuster GeForce GTX Titan, and it also launched at a time right when the FCAT utility became available, enabling reliable frame pacing analysis and exposing the weak points in AMD’s drivers at the time.

Since then AMD has been hard at work on both the software and hardware sides of their business, sorting out their frame pacing problems but also launching new products in the process. Most significant among these was the launch of their newer GCN 1.1 Hawaii GPU, and the Radeon R9 290 series cards that are powered by it. Though Tahiti remains in AMD’s product stack, Hawaii’s greater performance and additional features heralded the retail retirement of the dual-Tahiti 7990, once again leaving an opening in AMD’s product stack.

That brings us to today and the launch of the Radeon R9 295X2. After much consumer speculation and more than a few teasers, AMD is releasing their long-awaited Hawaii-powered entry to their dual-GPU series of cards. With Hawaii AMD has a very powerful (and very power hungry) GPU at their disposal, and for its incarnation in the R9 295X2 AMD is going above and beyond anything they’ve done before, making it very clear that they’re playing to win.

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