AMD Radeon 300 Series Won't Be A Rebrand

AMD Radeon 300 Series Won’t Be A Rebrand, New GPUs Coming in June

The AMD Radeon R9 300 series will reportedly contain no re-branded graphics cards from the R9 200 series. An entirely new lineup is coming at Computex. The report in question alleges that AMD’s original plan was centered around introducing a new flagship Radeon product this month and rebranding a few other R9 200 series products to R9 300 series products. Essentially making the R9 290X the new R9 380X and the R9 285 the new R9 370, so on and so forth.

To be completely honest, that’s what we had believed would happen as well. However according to the report there has been a change of plans and a massive one at that. Relatively recently AMD decided to take a different high-risk high-reward route with the R 300 series instead of the boring rebranding plan. Senior management and senior engineering heads at AMD have decided to introduce an entirely new line-up of GPUs, with no re-branding of older chips.

AMD Radeon 300 Series Won’t Be A Rebrand, Brand New GPUs Coming in June

I’m going to side-track for just a bit so bare with me. AMD’s Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy had stated on several occasions that “all of AMD’s future GPUs will support FreeSync“. The astute among you will deduce that for that to happen AMD simply cannot re-brand older Radeon 200 series GPUs to 300 series products. Purely because a significant portion of the R9/7 200 series does not support FreeSync. According to Huddy adding FreeSync support requires updating the display controller integrated into the GPU die itself, which would warrant a re-design of the die, something that’s extraordinarily expensive.

Currently AMD’s Hawaii (290 series), Tonga (285) and Bonaire (260 series) GPUs support FreeSync. This meant that AMD would have three chips which it can choose to re-brand without breaking FreeSync compatibility. There are however a few pitfalls to this strategy which may have led AMD to forgo it. One of which is the considerable gap between the Tonga chip, which is essentially an updated Tahiti (280X/280/7970/7950), and the Bonaire chip. This meant that AMD would have to design a new GPU to fill this gap anyway because it can’t use Pitcarin (270X/270/265/7870/7850) since it doesn’t support FreeSync. Another pitfall is that AMD cannot significantly improve the performance i.e. competitiveness of rebranded GPUs.

Now that we have successfully discussed what did not happen in the past and why, let’s talk about what will happen in the future. Just a couple of days ago AMD teased both its fans and the press with a yet unreleased, unannounced, ultra-enthusiast class Radeon graphics card. Which, AMD told us, was actually used to power several systems to demo Oculus VR at the GDC show floor.
Unfortunately that’s all that we’ve managed to get from the folks at AMD. Fortunately however we were told , in addition to several other journalists, that “much more” will be revealed about this mystery graphics card “soon”.