AMD Officially Confirms New Radeon Flagship – R9 390X Ultra-Enthusiast Graphics Card

AMD Officially Confirms New Radeon Flagship – R9 390X Ultra-Enthusiast Graphics Card In All Likelihood

AMD officially confirms for the first time ever the existence of a new Radeon flagship. The Fiji XT based Radeon R9 390X in all likelihood. The unreleased flagship graphics card in question was running the Showdown demo on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay. We exclusively told you four days ago that AMD was going to use the graphics card to run demos at GDC and in fact they did. In fact only three weeks ago we exclusively told you that AMD has sufficient inventory of the R9 390X to begin demoing it publicly.

Concept art rendering by VCZ

Tom’s Hardware reports :
I saw a demonstration of Showdown running on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay, being powered by anunannounced Radeon R9 flagship ultra-enthusiast product. Those words, in their exactness, were told to me officially, as in on the record, by AMD.

AMD Officially Confirms New Radeon Ultra-Enthusiast Flagship – Could This Be The Fabled R9 390X ?

AMD’s recently announced LiquidVR set of technologies were demoed on this unreleased flagship Radeon GPU. The virtual reality demo is dubbed “Showdown” and uses Unreal Engine 4. It involves a huge robot that’s causing all kinds of mayhem in the city around you. Explosions, flying debris and a car being flipped over all in a slow motion immersive 360 degree experience. Unfortunately this is all that’s been officially revealed by AMD so far, but it shouldn’t be long before AMD begins to divulge more details about the GPU now that they’ve began to use it in public demos.

Ryan Shrout from PCPer.com recently joked about how tight AMD was with the information they provided with regards to this new “flagship Radeon” graphics card.

During my meeting with AMD today I was told that inside that little PC sits the “upcoming flagship Radeon R9 graphics card” but, of course, no other information was given. The following is an estimated transcript of the event:
Ryan: Can I see it?
AMD: No.
Ryan: I can’t even take the side panel off it?
AMD: No.
Ryan: How can I know you’re telling the truth then? Can I open up the driver or anything?
AMD: No.
Ryan: GPU-Z? Anything?
AMD: No.
Well, I tried.

However AMD’s head of Visual Computing (i.e. graphics division ) Raja Koduri was quick to reassure Shrout that all “the juicy details” will be given “soon enough”

Back to the Radeon graphics card in question. From here on all the information that you will see concerning the R9 390X is based on unconfirmed/unofficial but very legitimate leaks. The R9 390X graphics card will allegedly be based on AMD’s upcoming flagship Fiji XT GPU. The graphics card will be the first ever to feature stacked high bandwidth memory, or HBM for short.

The card will allegedly feature a hybrid “Hydra” liquid cooling unit similar to the one on the company’s current dual-GPU flagship and the fastest graphics card in the world the R9 295X2. Fiji XT will allegedly feature 4096 stream processors, 4GB of HBM VRAM, 4096bit wide memory interface for a whopping 640GB/S bandwidth, nearly three times as much memory bandwidth as the GTX 980.

We were told that AMD was working on something “Crazy’ for GDC just recently, now we know what had gotten Stardock’s CEO so excited. With these specifications we can tell that this is a beast of a GPU that will undoubtedly go head to head with Nvidia’s just announced GeForce GTX Titan XGM200 based flagship.

The following R9 390X specifications are unofficial and are based on various leaks.

WCCFTech	Stream Processors	Memory System	Memory Bandwidth	Memory Interface	GPU Clock Speed	Compute Performance
AMD Radeon R9 390X Fiji XT	4096	4GB Stacked HBM	640GB/S	4096bit Wide IO	1018Mhz~	~ 8.2TFLOP*
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X GM200-400	3072 !	12GB GDDR5	336GB/S !	384bit GDDR5	1.2Ghz~	6.9TFLOP*
AMD Radeon R9 290X Hawaii XT	2816	4GB GDDR5	320GB/S	512bit GDDR5	1000Mhz	5.6TFLOP
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GM204-400	2048	4GB GDDR5	224GB/S	256bit GDDR5	1216Mhz	4.6TFLOP

* Conservative estimates based on SP count and clock speed. They don’t account for any architectural improvements.