In a rather lengthy but quite interesting GPU 14 event which you could have watched live (well sort of) last night, AMD has finally and officially announced the new R9 and R7 series graphics cards that will be a part of the new Volcanic Islands family of GPUs. The lineup kicks off with the new R9 290X flagship followed by the R9 280X, R9 270X as well as the R7 260X and the R7 250.

Unfortunately, AMD has shed very little information regarding the new flagship R9 290X graphics cards other than it is the first graphics card with 5TFLOPs of GPU performance. Although it did not say which GPU is behind it, AMD previously noted that it has more than 6 billion transistors. AMD also noted that the R9 290X will pack 4GB of memory with a total of memory bandwidth of over 300GB/sec, which if combined with a 512-bit memory interface would put memory clock speed at around 4.7GHz.

While it did reveal that the pre-order for the R9 290X flagship will start on 3rd of October, it did not shed any details regarding the price or the specs for it.

Apparently, the lineup will also include the R9 290 graphics card but that one was not even mentioned by AMD during the event so we guess that it will just have different clocks when compared to the R9 290X. It is quite likely that we are looking at the same GPU in its Pro and XT versions.

Unlike the flagship R9 290X, AMD revealed a bit more info regarding the rest of the lineup so the R9 280X will pack 3GB of memory and have a US $299 price tag. While it did not want to talk much about performance, AMD did reveal that it scores over 6800 points in 3DMark Firestrike benchmark. AMD's Matt Skynner referred to it as the perfect graphics card designed for 1440p gaming. Below the R9 280X stands the R9 270X with 2GB of RAM, US $199 price tag and can score over 5500 points in the same 3DMark FireStrike benchmark.

The R7-series has two graphics cards, the R7 260X and the R7 250. The R7 260X has a US $139 price tag, 2GB of memory and gets over 3700 points in 3DMark Firestrike benchmarks. Last but not the least is the US $89 price R7 250, which packs 1GB of memory and scores over 2000 points in 3DMark Firestrike.

Hopefully, we will not wait too long for full specifications as well as more details regarding the entire lineup and at these price points, it looks like AMD will put a lot of pressure on Nvidia, especially if the rumored performance estimates for the R9 290X turns out to be true.








AMD Radeon R9 290X

AMD Radeon R9 280X

AMD Radeon R9 270X

AMD Radeon R7 260X

AMD Radeon R7 250

Source: AMD.com