Home / Component / Graphics / AMD Radeon R9 380X with ‘Tonga XT’ to hit the market in late October

AMD Radeon R9 380X with ‘Tonga XT’ to hit the market in late October

Advanced Micro Devices and its partners are gearing up to release the Radeon R9 380X graphics card featuring the code-named “Tonga XT” graphics processing unit. The product is expected to hit the market next month and will become a good addition to the company’s lineup for the holiday season.

Manufacturers of graphics cards already have samples of the fully-fledged “Tonga” graphics chip with 2048 stream processors, 128 texture units and 32 raster operations pipelines. AMD is expected to start shipping commercial versions of the “Tonga XT” GPUs shortly and makers of add-in-boards should be able to start selling their Radeon R9 380X products sometimes in late October, reports Fudzilla.

The AMD Radeon R9 380X graphics adapters will carry 4GB of GDDR5 memory, which indicates a 256-bit memory bus, not a 384-bit memory interface, as expected by several unofficial sources. Usage of 256-bit memory interface should simplify printed-circuit boards of the graphics cards and make them cheaper. As a result, makers of add-in-boards will be more flexible in terms of final pricing.

amd_radeon_r9_280

Performance of AMD Radeon R9 380X in actual games should be higher than that of the Radeon R9 280X (aka Radeon HD 7970) despite of wider memory interface supported by the latter thanks to improvements on the micro-architectural level (such as better support for async shaders, improved performance of tessellation/gemetry and so on) and new techniques that improve effective memory bandwidth (e.g., delta colour compression).

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: The Radeon R9 380X looks rather good on paper. However, its success will be determined by pricing. Right now, AMD and its partners sell the Radeon R9 380 for $249, whereas the Radeon R9 390 is priced at $349. Keeping in mind that AMD used to sell its Radeon R9 290-series products for as low as around $250, it is hard to imagine that a product with lower performance for $299 will become a success. If AMD actually wants to fight back market share from Nvidia, it will have to reconsider its prices for the holiday season. As a result, it is logical to expect that the launch of the Radeon R9 380X will be accompanied by changes in AMD’s price-list.

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15 comments

  1. i told the nvidia fanboys that amd would start taking back the gpu market share, but they did not want to believe it.the turning of the tide has already begin in amd’s favor.the release of the 380x cements that.

  2. As a long time AMD/ATI user, I see this as a massive fail. Its going to underperformed the same price Nvida card. Should have used HBM

  3. What, pray-tell, is the same priced nVidia card that this is ‘a massive fail’ against?

    Since we don’t yet have the pricing for this card, that’s kind of hard to calculate, don’t ya think?

  4. I base this upon the new premium version of this architecture, with more cores and HBM (Fury X) doesn’t even match the much older nVida 980Ti cards running on much narrower memory bandwidth on GDD5. If the new architecture design doesn’t match the performance/optimisation of the competitions previous generations cards at the top, its not going to mend its self for cheaper cards.

    To top this the card has crippled memory bus, which is smaller than the previous generation of this card.
    Its all irrelevant as whoever gets 12/14nm dies out first will take a massive lead in performance. If nVida can do this when they say (q1 2016 with HBM2), just as the requirement for a Huge jump in performance is demanded by VR then its going to get very hard for AMD very quickly.
    With the lack of resources for R&D, as shown by the poor sales in all areas its looking like its break up/sell off time coming soon.
    Just my 10 cents.

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  6. You didn’t answer my question. How do you know which nVidia card this will compete with if we don’t have a price yet? The 390x destroys the GTX970 in most games, and the Fury cards all soundly beat the GTX980 in virtually every benchmark, too, so clearly, AMD can compete. So once again, how are you sure this 380x will lose to the comparably-priced nVidia card if we don’t have a price yet?

  7. Geez, even if you are an Nvidia fanboy, you should want AMD to regain marketshare so Nvidia would be forced to compete. Things are best for consumers when marketshare is closer to 50/50. I like Nvidia products, but I’m buying mostly / only AMD on purpose to drive Nvidia’s marketshare down.

    The performance is similar, and I feel that AMD’s drivers are unfairly impugned as of late (they’re more than good enough) so it’s not like I’m losing out on good gaming performance either. I used to buy only Nvidia Riva and Geforce cards for over 10 years, but now I realize that giving the market leader more marketshare is a TERRIBLE way to promote competition, so now I just buy AMD to try and keep competition alive.

    It’s honestly how I tend to evaluate many (not all) of my purchases. Basically I try to support weaker players so the strong ones have to stay competitive and never become monopolies.

  8. I agree that if they price it right, it could beat the 960 soundly, and maybe steal some thunder from the 970 if it’s significantly cheaper than the 970.

    I also believe that it’s mostly about pricing. Now that the 950 is out, Nvidia’s pretty much got all its cards on the table, and when the 380x comes out (and hopefully it will) AMD will have everything out too except for the FuryX2. If that’s anything like the 295×2 though, it might be a breakout product.

  9. I am a amd fan,but if it was the other way around,and it was nvidia doing bad in the market,and amd doing good.I would do the same as you.I would buy nvidia products to keep competition alive,so amd could continue making quality products.

  10. You really are speaking without facts. This card will more than enough bandwidth for its price point. Since when 256bit is crippled with GDDR5 as clock speeds are pretty damn high on those chips now? Without price you are just preaching hate for AMD right now. Yea I wish AMD stayed original to their pricing structure with fury cards and priced them at 550 for top model then they would be a steal for the price. But the underlining truth probably is that they can’t produce enough cards with first gen HBM and they are trying to control the demand by pricing it high. It shows when they are hard to find no matter where you go. 380x for $250 390 for 299 and 390x for 350 will easily win back some market share for amd. I have no idea why they haven’t been aggressive about those, may be because that leaves too big of a gap between fury and these cards. They probably can’t produce many of those for now thus pricing them high to control demand.

  11. what you don’t understand is they can’t produce those damn HBM cards until they are on a 14 or 16nm. They can’t stick HBM in everything if they manufacturing process is not ramped up and its such a big damn chip that they can’t produce them in bunches. Other than the regular fury cards, fury x are hard to find simply because they can’t make enough and they priced them high to control demand. Once the production ramps up you will probably see the prices drop but I highly doubt this happens until second gen HBM2 cards. We have to wait for 14nm or 16nm to see a whole lineup based on HBM.

  12. The 380X Has a ton of potential. Heck, I think it may become the next price-performance king when it comes out.

    That is, If it offers identical, if not, close to identical performance as the GTX 970 for 1080p. That would utterly kill the GTX 970. There would be no reason to get a 970 anymore unless you are a die-hard Nvidia Fan. I think the 380X Can do that.

  13. Well, it’s November and no 380X. I too want to know where it sits in the price table as the 280X is ridiculously overpriced right now.

  14. Don’t worry,the 380x will come out later this month, and its going to rock.i thought it was going to come out in october,but a month late isn’t to far off.

  15. So long as it can fit that £199 4 GB GDDR5 gap, that would be great. I’m tempted to go for the R9 380, but it has inferior performance to the 280X, being based on the 285.