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AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC

27 September 2014, 19:34
Written by Foxter
Views: 2014
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Last month AMD held their 30 years of graphics celebration, during which they announced their next Radeon video card, the Radeon R9 285. Designed to be AMD’s new $249 midrange enthusiast card, the R9 285 would be launching on September 2nd. In the process the R9 285 would be a partial refresh of their R9 280 series lineup, supplying it with a new part that would serve to replace their nearly 3 year old Tahiti GPU.

The R9 285 is something of a lateral move for AMD, which is something we very rarely see in this industry. The R9 285’s immediate predecessor, the R9 280 (vanilla) has been on the market with an MSRP of $249 for nearly 4 months now. Meanwhile the R9 285 is not designed to be meaningfully faster than the R9 280 – in fact if you looked at the raw specifications, you’d rightfully guess it would be slower. Instead the R9 285 is intended to serve as a sort of second-generation feature update to R9 280, replacing it with a card at the same price with roughly the same performance level, but with 3 years’ worth of amassed feature updates and optimizations.

To accomplish this AMD has minted a new GPU, Tonga. We’ll go into more detail on Tonga in a bit, but at its core Tonga is in many ways an optimized version of Tahiti. More importantly though, Tonga is also the first GPU in AMD’s next Graphics Core Next architecture revision, which we will come to know as GCN 1.2. As a result, this launch won’t come with a significant shift in AMD’s performance-value, but for buyers it offers an improved feature set for those apprehensive about buying into Tahiti 3 years later, and for enthusiast it offers us a look at what the next iteration of AMD’s GPUs will look like.

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