By Dave James
Introduction and features
The new AMD Radeon R9 380X is the very latest midrange graphics card from the big Texan GPU maker, and should be filtering into shops and onto the e-shelves as you read this.
Asus’ STRIX brand is its gaming-centric option and, as such, this owl-eyed version of the R9 380X comes with a little factory overclocking and a very tasty cooling array.
But to really call the R9 380X itself a new card is something of a misnomer.
That’s not to say the R9 380X’s Tonga XT chip isn’t an advanced graphics core. In fact, after the Fiji GPUs that have gone into AMD’s R9 Fury, Fury X and Nano cards, it’s the most advanced chip AMD has got in its armoury.
The fact this GPU could have been launched around a year ago, when AMD first released the Tonga processor, does show something of how the company is progressing its graphics silicon. Given the missed production shrink down to a 20nm lithography AMD has largely had to stick with the same 28nm Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture it used for the last few …read more
Source:: techradar.com – PC and Mac