AMD GPU14 Tech Day, PC Gamers Celebrate!

  Hey there! September 25, 2013 was a great day indeed for GPU manufacturers, AMD,  because the long awaitd AMD GPU14 tech day event happened and they had a lot of announcement regarding their upcoming new releases of graphics cards, finally NVIDIA will experience some competition! Though the announce was vague in a sense that there were no exact release dates given, ahww such a shame, but of course some promises in the near future wouldn’t hurt to get excited would it? 

AMD Radeon R7 and R9 Series.

     Of course if you are a gamer, I consider this as a hobby so I’m not a gamer, there are two problems that they encounter most of the time which are; wallet size and preferences. AMD made two types of graphics card depending on what type of gamer you are. If you are the type that doesn’t have much of a wallet size but to live up to the name of being a gamer the AMD R7 series if the best fit for you. On the other hand if you are the type that money is not issue type of thing the AMD R9 series is the best fit for you. Depending on the price tag, the GPU had different amount of memory in it and of course the memory is not the whole story here, each GPU introduced was tested under 3DMark Firestrike. 

AMD Radeon R7 250

VRAM: 1GB GDDR

Price: <$89

3DMark Firestrike: >2000

AMD Radeon R7 260X

VRAM: 2GB GDDR

Price: $139

3DMark Firestrike: >3700

AMD Radeon R9 270X

VRAM: 2GB GDDR

Price: $199

3DMark Firestrike: >5500

AMD Radeon R9 280X

VRAM: 3GB GDDR

Price: $299

3DMark Firestrike: >6800

AMD Radeon R9 290X

VRAM: 4 GB GDDR

Price: TBD

3DMark Firestrike: See below

Well since AMD is a competitor for GPU manufacturing industry beating the top of the line products is a must to change the game for the industry. Though the R9 290X doesn’t have some specs revealed it had some "so called" promising features to be expected from the said GPU, like it scoring above 8000 on the 3DMark, a 512-bit memory bus, and possibily beating NVIDIA’s most powerful GTX Titan in terms of performance.  

The event went into further detail on AMD's ace-in-the-hole. Here's the rest of what they had to say:

 - The R9 290X will use the GCN (Graphics Core Next)      Architecture

 - It's enhanced to support DirectX 11.2

 - It has more than 6 Billion Transistors

 - It has over 300 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth

 - It can compute over 5 TFLOPS

 - It can render more than 4 Billion Triangles/sec

AMD TrueAudio Technology

    Well, AMD really wanted to change the game, because they didn’t just focus on bringing exquisite graphics experience but also in terms of audio experience. They introduced “AMD TrueAudio”, yey players! This technology is a fully programmable audio engine for developers, geeks, to play with. Well if that’s the case we will be able to experience more vibrant gameplay by enriching the sounds output in 7.1 channel and 2.0 channels for those players that bought expensive headphones or simple stereo speakers. This technology is expected to be available on R7 260X, R9 290, and R9 290X. 

Mantle

    In the said event they also introduced what they call Mantle. Basically, in the nutshell, this is a low level application programming interface for PCs that optimizes games to run on AMD Hardware, and also to assist game developers to port games to different platforms, you rock AMD!

AMD Gaming Evolved App

     The final announcement was about the AMD Gaming Evolved App powered by Raptr. Which is basically an app for PC. This app can function as an auto-optimizer that supports 28 select games depending on the current PC rig. Another function of this app is to get rewards when playing games through this client, with also some functionalities like broadcast via twitch, stream watching, screenshot taking, and some sharing function on facebook, and twitter without leaving the game!