AMD Radeon R200 Series “Volcanic Islands” GPUs

Today AMD will start their new series called Volcanic Islands. Apart from Hawaii GPU, Radeon R200 series are all about rebrands.

What to expect from GPU14 event in Hawaii

The official presentation of their latest gaming GPU — Hawaii. Of course everyone is counting that AMD will actually show the new card during the event, and it’s almost obvious they will, especially since multiple pictures have already been leaked. To be honest I don’t know whether reviewers will publish their articles right after NDA lifts. There is no reason why they shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the NDA is just about the new Hawaii architecture, rather than R9 290X to be specific.

In a preliminary briefing AMD’s Raja Koduri said they will address CrossFire experience by showing a new drivers. What he also said is that the company will now pay more attention to Linux support, which is quite interesting since NVIDIA is trying to do the same thing, at the same time. This could be really important news for Linux users. Moreover Raja also said that they are working on a new gaming development tools, which in the end would ease the porting procedure between consoles and PCs.

And finally, we have Battlefield 4. People who were invited to the event are more than sure that Battlefield 4 will play a big role in today’s announcement. In fact some even claim that BF4 will be bundled with the new card. AMD’s twitter is adding even more fuel to this rumor:

AMD Radeon R7 270 equipped with Curacao is slower than GTX 760

On the contrary to common believe the Curacao GPU will be used with R7 270, not 260. At least that’s what the most credible sources claim. The Curacao GPU is nothing else than Pitcairn rebrand. It even has the same device ID in the drivers. What we should expect are higher clocks in comparison to HD 7870. Additionally, first performance figures have been posted on Chiphell and it’s still slower than GTX 760 (-10%), at least that’s in terms of gaming performance. Whereas in terms of performance per Watt, R7 270 is more efficient (+14%).
Average performance:
GTX 760 →100%
GTX 660Ti →94.5%
R7 270 →89.7%
HD 7870 →82.4%

Performance per Watt:
GTX 760 →100%
GTX 660Ti →108%
R7 270 →119%
HD 7870 →114%

AMD Radeon R 200 Series

I made this chart a while ago. I’m posting it just to show you that AMD Volcanic Islands may indeed have new names for their GPUs, only most of them were already used for older cards. The only unconfirmed graphics card on this list is the non-x R9 280. All we know is that 280X will utilize Tahiti variant, what we don’t know is which one. Although device ID clearly suggest XT model. For that reason we think that R9 280 will use PRO variant.

AMD Radeon R7 260, 250 and 240

AMD recently updated their drivers to support Oland GPU:

• AMD6610.1 = “AMD Radeon R7 200 Series”
• AMD6613.1 = “AMD Radeon R7 200 Series”

Oland is slower than Cape Verde. Although it was just added to the drivers, it doesn’t mean it’s new. In fact earlier this month introduced Radeon HD 8670 and HD 8570 graphics card. Both use the same GPU as R7 250-240 series. In comparison to Cape Verde they have less cores and less ROPs. That being said we have almost a perfect counterpart for GT 630 with GK208 GPU.

The live event

Of course we will be watching the live stream and posting news as soon as they are made official.