Wednesday, June 3, 2015

The next BEST graphics card in the world! The R9 390X.

AMD is about to release the new R9 300 series gpus. The most interesting of them is the R9 390X, which might just become the best consumer graphics card in the world. Yes. Better than the Titan X. 
Titan X R9 390X
Cores 3072 Cuda 4096 GCN
Memory 12 GB of GDDR5 8 GB of HBM
Base clock 1.00 GHz 1.00 GHz
The two cards have identical base clock speeds and they both have a 28nm manufacturing process The 390X does have 30% more cores, but the Titan has 30% more memory. So why would the 390X be better than the Titan? Having 1024 extra cores might give the 390X an advantage, but not as much as the 8GB of HBM memory does.

Of course, it's true that the Titan has more memory, but the 390X has HBM memory. This new type of vram is a lot denser, thus making it a lot faster than GDDR5. How much faster? The Titan X has 336 GB/s memory bandwidth, while the 390X will have almost three time as much, 800GB/s. This difference will make the 390X capable of achieving much higher framerates and overall better performance. And if that wouldn't be enough for you, the R9 395X2 with almost double the performance is expected to be released by the end of the year. With this level of performance I wonder when will 8K support for games arrive. Oh, wait! First we need 8K monitors.