AMD unveils 'Hawaii' Radeon R7, R9 generation of GPUs

[Night Hawk]

AMD unveils 'Hawaii' Radeon R7, R9 generation of GPUs

AMD unveiled its Hawaii GPU in a Webcast from Oahu, with configurable audio as the key selling point for this generation of graphics cards.

By Mark Hachman
September 26, 2013 06:14 AM ET

PC World - AMD announced theA Radeon R7 and R9 series of "Hawaii" graphics cards and cores on Wednesday, an attempt to storm the pinnacle of performance PC graphics.

AMD broadcast what it called its "GPU 14 Tech Day Event" from Hawaii, where the company had offered to host reporters at its expense. PCWorld covered the event via webcast.

AMD's Hawaii chips are based on what the company calls its Graphics Core Next architecture, the second generation of which is contained within the Hawaii cores.A AMD launched the R9 and R7 series as a top-to-bottom approach: the R9 is for performance gamers, and the R7 series is aimed at the lower-budget customer.

Matt Skynner, general manager for the graphics business unit, told the audience that AMD's plan was "to create unified Radeon gaming experience across all platforms," from mobile to the cloud with the Radeon Sky gaming strategy.A Skynner highlighted the developers behind the Crysis and Tomb Raider series, and noted that AMD powers all three major game consoles.A The PC graphics hardware market is growing to $21 billion in 2017, according to Jon Peddie Research--proof that gamers have the budget for high-end cards.

AMD is able to let developers port games from one platform to another, with tools as well as an architecture that makes it easy to do so, Skynner said. "And what's important is not that we're trying to drive the industry from a performance view, we're trying to put reality on the screen" with innovations like TressFx, AMD's hair-modeling system, and depth of field and shadowing, plus its EyeFinity multi-monitor technology.

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[DreadStarX]

Hmm.. The fact that they haven't released a price for the 290X version seems sketchy. One of my fellow classmates told me that AMD released an article stating that the latest graphics cards would be 5% better than the NVidia Titan Cards. From just looking at those released specs, I highly doubt that it will be anywhere near it. I've seen what those Titan cards can do, they are gnarly as hell, and damn well worth the price.

AMD won't win this round with graphics cards, NVidia for life.

- Tom

 

[Night Hawk]

The only way to know for sure is when the benchmarks are seen as with any other new model series of cards. I never go strictly by reviews since anyone can write one up just to make something look good.
(just saw one news report on how even kids are making money writing up reviews for $3-$4 a piece! 19 Companies Fined for Fake Yelp Reviews )

As for any reviews being released by either AMD or NVidia expect to some bolstering of their own product lines as expected. They obviously want to look better then the competition in order to generate interest in their own latest.

With pc games, graphics, multimedia once the vpu goes past a certain point depending on a particular program was designed or what level of quality a video is at don't expect much more as far as performance and quality. With games in mind I can notes on how little difference can be seen with just one brand of card despite going up on GDDR from build to build going from 256mb to 1gb and memory expanding from 2gb to the present 16gb and not notice any particular item to rave about excluding processing speeds as far as cpu power however.

The one thing I can state that favors AMD over the original ATI despite that old company's one time lead over NVidia is the fact that AMD supports what they make much, much longer then ATI ever thought of doing and likely why ATI failed as a business. With the old ATI once you went two model series newer the latest updates would not work on the older cards! Plus you were moving up from AGP and PCI to PCIe 1.0, 2.0 and onward from there right as AMD was buying ATI out. Yet with AMD an old PCIe 11.1 card sees support even for Win 8 while ATI would consider it abandoned.