The first preliminary specs of the reportedly canceled AMD Radeon R9 285X graphics card have arrived to the Internet, which hints that such a card exists and will, after all, be launched on the market.
The Radeon R9 285X will feature a Tonga XT GPU with six integrated 64-bit memory controllers, which means that the GPU will offer a 384-bit memory interface. In addition to that the card will have 32 ROPs, 128 texture units and 2048 GCN 1.2 stream processors. The GPU will also offer two interesting technologies – GPU Compute Context Switch for better multitasking and GPU Graphics Preemption for improved process priorities.
Unfortunately, the upcoming AMD card will have 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, accessed over a 256-bit memory bus, which means that two of the integrated memory controllers will not be used on purpose. This fact, by itself, hints that AMD may have an even more powerful product in the works that will enjoy the full power of the 384-bit memory bus. The on-board GDDR5 memory will run at 7000 MHz effective. The card will provide support for the Mantle API, TrueAudio, XDMA (CrossFire) and ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine). The Radeon R9 285X will likely compete with the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card.
The official launch date and the price of the card are still to be revealed.
Source: Kitguru.net