AMD officially announces Radeon R9 285 and Never Settle: Space Edition

Published: Sep 2nd 2014, 08:48 GMT

RADEON R9 285

Today AMD officially introduces new graphics card in R9 series lineup, the Radeon R9 285.

Tonga, Tahiti successor

R9 285 is based on Tonga PRO GPU, which is actually not the full chip. Card based on full fledged Tonga will launch later this month (R9 285X).

Tonga PRO has 1792 Stream Cores, 112 TMUs and 32 ROPs. Radeon R9 285 is clocked at 918 MHz with the memory at 1375 MHz. Memory configuration is what differentiates this card from its Tahiti predecessors. Tonga has in fact shorter bus (256b), but AMD developed more efficient algorithms like color compression, which actually increased memory bandwidth efficiency by 40%. The only question is, are gamers going to notice?

r9 285 technical supplement (3)

The other feature are new pre-scaler and upgraded display controllers. This should technically improve game-play experience at higher resolutions.

r9 285 technical supplement (4)

Tonga is also equipped with new 16-bit floating point integer instructions, which allow low power GPU computing and media processing. Tonga has improved compute task scheduling. These technologies are meant to increase power efficiency.

r9 285 technical supplement (2)

Tonga improved geometry processing (4 primitives per clock cycle), which dramatically increase tessellation rate in complex scenes.

r9 285 technical supplement (1)

Last but not least, those who often use graphics card power for media transcoding, will welcome what Tonga has to offer in 4k H254 processing.

4k r9 285

AMD Radeon R9 285 specifications

AMD Radeon R9 280 Series
Radeon R9 280Radeon R9 285Radeon R9 280XRadeon R9 285X
GPU CodenameTahiti PROTonga PROTahiti XTTonga XT
Unified Cores1792179220482048
TMUs112112128128
ROPs32323232
Base Clock827 MHz850 MHz
Boost Clock933 MHz918 MHz1000 MHz ?
Memory Clock1250 MHz1375 MHz1500 MHz ?
Memory3GB GDDR52GB/4GB GDDR53GB GDDR5 ?
Memory Bus384-bit256-bit384-bit ?
Bandiwdth240 GB/s176 GB/s288 GB/s ?
Connectors6-pin + 6-pin6-pin + 6-pin8-pin + 6-pin8-pin + 6-pin
TDP200W190W250W?
Launch DateMarch 2014September 2014October 2013September 2014
MSRP$279$249$299 $349?

AMD Radeon R9 285 Press slides

These slides explain pretty well what new Never Settle: Space Edition is all about, so I won’t keep you waiting.

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AMD Radeon R9 285 custom models

asus radeon r9 285 2 asus radeon r9 285 3 asus radeon r9 285 club3d radeon r9 285 1 club3d radeon r9 285 2 gigabyte radeon r9 285 1 gigabyte radeon r9 285 2 msi radeon r9 285 1 msi radeon r9 285 2 powercolor radeon r9 285 1 powercolor radeon r9 285 2 sapphire radeon r9 285 1 sapphire radeon r9 285 2 xfx radeon r9 285 1




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