Quiet launch for a new SKU built around the Trinidad XT GPU, a refreshed variant of the venerable Pitcairn of 7800-series fame.
Quiet launch for a new SKU built around the Trinidad XT GPU, a refreshed variant of the venerable Pitcairn of 7800-series fame.
Alongside yesterday’s preview of the Radeon R9 Nano AMD also launched a new SKU for the Rx 300-series, and it’s a new face for a familiar friend. The Radeon R9 370X is a mid-range GPU set to enter the <$200 segment of the market, clearly gunning for NVIDIA's GTX 960 in the value-oriented price/performance bracket, and has components which date back to the 7000-series.
At the heart of the R9 370X is a GPU codenamed Trinidad XT, the bigger brother to the Trinidad PRO within the already-established Radeon R7 370. This silicon is based on the Curaçao XT GPU of R9 270X fame, which in tern was based on the Pitcairn XT design released as the Radeon HD7870. Technical specs for the R9 370X are solidly mid-range, featuring 1280 shaders (20 Compute Units), 80 TMUs and 32 ROPs; as a result it’s best for 1080p gaming at medium-high settings. As with all AMD 300-series GPUs the R9 370C supports DirectX 12, Vulcan and Mantle APIs, as well as AMD’s FreeSync technology. AMD TrueAudio is not supported.
This is the third (and hopefully final) outing for what is at its core still the HD7870, a card which has held up well over the years despite the launch of bigger and more technically complex GPUs. Presuming that all goes well with the transition to 14/16nm FinFET, we should be seeing brand new mid-range silicon from AMD next year.
The sole launch partner for R9 370X is Sapphire, who are shipping custom 2GB and 4GB variants of the card. Hitting close to 1200MHz, the core clocks on the Sapphire cards are considerably higher than reference R9 270X parts, aided no doubt by Sapphires Vapour-X cooling solution. Memory remains at a reference 5.60 GHz, which combined with a 256-bit memory bus means that it is capable of a memory bandwidth up to 179.2 GB/s.
AMD’s Rx 300-series now seems all but complete, with perhaps only a potential Tonga XT/R9 380X remaining. New parts based on the Fiji GPU with High Bandwidth Memory could still be waiting in the wings however, including a dual-GPU configuration card, but they are unlikely to be marketed under the 300-series banner.
SOURCE: TechPowerUp
