The Radeon 300 series is a series of
graphics processors developed by
AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...
. All of the GPUs of the series are produced in 28 nm format and use the
Graphics Core Next
Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was lau ...
(GCN) micro-architecture.
The series includes the Fiji and Tonga GPU dies based on AMD's GCN 3 or "Volcanic Islands" architecture, which had originally been introduced with the Tonga based (though cut-down) R9 285 slightly earlier. Some of the cards in the series include the Fiji based flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, cut-down Radeon R9 Fury and small form factor Radeon R9 Nano, which are the first GPUs to feature
High Bandwidth Memory
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a high-speed computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators ...
(HBM) technology, which AMD co-developed in partnership with
SK Hynix
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker (after Samsung Electronics) and the world's third-largest semiconductor company ...
. HBM is faster and more power efficient than
GDDR5 memory, though also more expensive. However, the remaining GPUs in the series outside the Tonga based R9 380 and R9 380X are
based on previous generation GPUs with revised power management, and therefore only feature GDDR5 memory (something Tonga does as well). The Radeon 300 series cards including the R9 390X were released on June 18, 2015. The flagship device, the Radeon R9 Fury X, was released on June 24, 2015, with the dual-GPU variant, the
Radeon Pro Duo, being released on April 26, 2016.
Micro-architecture and instruction set
The R9 380/X along with the R9 Fury & Nano series were AMD's first cards (after the earlier R9 285) to use the third iteration of their GCN instruction set and micro-architecture. The other cards in the series feature first and second gen iterations of GCN. The
table below details which GCN-generation each chip belongs to.
Ancillary ASICs
Any ancillary
ASIC
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...
s present on the chips are being developed independently of the core architecture and have their own version name schemes.
Multi-monitor support
The
AMD Eyefinity
AMD Eyefinity is a brand name for AMD video card products that support multi-monitor setups by integrating multiple (up to six) display controllers on one GPU. AMD Eyefinity was introduced with the Radeon HD 5000 Series "Evergreen" in September 2 ...
branded on-
die
Die, as a verb, refers to death, the cessation of life.
Die may also refer to:
Games
* Die, singular of dice, small throwable objects used for producing random numbers
Manufacturing
* Die (integrated circuit), a rectangular piece of a semicondu ...
display controller
A video display controller or VDC (also called a display engine or display interface) is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing ...
s were introduced in September 2009 in the
Radeon HD 5000 Series
The Evergreen series is a family of GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices for its Radeon line under the ATI brand name. It was employed in Radeon HD 5000 graphics card series and competed directly with Nvidia's GeForce 400 Series.
Release
T ...
and have been present in all products since.
AMD TrueAudio
AMD TrueAudio was introduced with the AMD Radeon Rx 200 Series, but can only be found on the
dies of GCN 2nd gen and later products.
Video acceleration
AMD's
SIP core for video acceleration,
Unified Video Decoder
Unified Video Decoder (UVD, previously called Universal Video Decoder) is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1.
UVD was introduced with ...
and
Video Coding Engine
Video Code Engine (VCE, was earlier referred to as Video Coding Engine, Video Compression Engine or Video Codec Engine in official AMD documentation) is AMD's video encoding application-specific integrated circuit implementing the video codec H. ...
, are found on all GPUs and are supported by
AMD Catalyst
AMD Radeon Software is a device driver and utility software package for AMD's graphics cards and APUs. Its graphical user interface is built with Electron and is compatible with 64-bit Windows and Linux distributions.
Software bundle
Func ...
and by the
open-source Radeon graphics driver.
Frame limiter
A completely new feature to the lineup allows users to reduce power consumption by not rendering unnecessary frames. It will be user configurable.
LiquidVR support
LiquidVR is a technology that improves the smoothness of virtual reality. The aim is to reduce latency between hardware so that the hardware can keep up with the user's head movement, eliminating the motion sickness. A particular focus is on dual GPU setups where each GPU will now render for one eye individually of the display.
Virtual super resolution support
Originally introduced with the previous generation R9 285 and R9 290 series graphics cards, this feature allows users to run games with higher image quality by rendering frames at above native resolution. Each frame is then
downsampled to native resolution. This process is an alternative to
supersampling
Supersampling or supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing method, i.e. a method used to remove aliasing (jagged and pixelated edges, colloquially known as "jaggies") from images rendered in computer games or other computer p ...
which is not supported by all games. Virtual super resolution is similar to
Dynamic Super Resolution
The GeForce 600 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in 2012. They served as the introduction of the Kepler architecture.
Overview
Where the goal of the previous architecture, Fermi, was to inc ...
, a feature available on competing
nVidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
graphics cards, but trades flexibility for increased performance.
OpenCL (API)
OpenCL accelerates many scientific Software Packages against CPU up to factor 10 or 100 and more.
Open CL 1.0 to 1.2 are supported for all Chips with Terascale and GCN Architecture. OpenCL 2.0 is supported with GCN 2nd Gen. and higher.
For OpenCL 2.1 and 2.2 only Driver Updates are necessary with OpenCL 2.0 conformant Cards.
Vulkan (API)
API Vulkan 1.0 is supported for all GCN architecture cards. Vulkan 1.2 requires GCN 2nd gen or higher with the Adrenalin 20.1 and Linux Mesa 20.0 drivers and newer.
Chipset tables
Desktop models
Mobile models
Radeon Feature Matrix
Graphics device drivers
Proprietary graphics device driver Catalyst
AMD Catalyst is being developed for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
. As of July 2014, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the
AMD FirePro
AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/ GP ...
brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers.
AMD Catalyst supports all features advertised for the Radeon brand.
Free and open-source graphics device driver radeon
The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on and for
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
, but have been ported to other operating systems as well. Each driver is composed out of five parts:
# Linux kernel component
DRM
DRM may refer to:
Government, military and politics
* Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd
* Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar
* Direction du renseignement milita ...
# Linux kernel component
KMS driver
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations su ...
: basically the device driver for the
display controller
A video display controller or VDC (also called a display engine or display interface) is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing ...
# user-space component libDRM
# user-space component in
Mesa 3D
Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.
Its most ...
# a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for
X.Org Server
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...
, which is finally about to be replaced by
Glamor
The free and open-source
radeon
kernel driver supports most of the features implemented into the Radeon line of GPUs.
The
radeon
kernel driver is ''not''
reverse engineered
Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...
, but based on documentation released by AMD. This drivers still requires proprietary microcode to operate DRM functions and some GPUs may fail to launch the X server if not available.
Free and open-source graphics device driver amdgpu
This new kernel driver is directly supported and developed by AMD. It is available on various Linux distributions, and has been ported to some other operating systems as well. Only GCN GPUs are supported.
Proprietary graphics device driver AMDGPU-PRO
This new driver by AMD is still undergoing development, but can be used on a few supported Linux distributions already (AMD officially supports Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS). The driver has been experimentally ported to ArchLinux
and other distributions. AMDGPU-PRO is set to replace the previous AMD Catalyst driver and is based on the free and open source
amdgpu
kernel driver. Pre-GCN GPUs are not supported.
See also
*
Graphics Core Next
Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was lau ...
*
AMD FirePro
AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/ GP ...
*
AMD FireMV AMD FireMV, formerly ATI FireMV, is brand name for graphics cards marketed as a Multi-Display 2D video card, with 3D capabilities same as the low-end Radeon graphics products. It competes directly with Matrox professional video cards. FireMV cards ...
*
AMD FireStream
AMD FireStream was AMD's brand name for their Radeon-based product line targeting stream processing and/or GPGPU in supercomputers. Originally developed by ATI Technologies around the Radeon X1900 XTX in 2006, the product line was previously b ...
*
List of AMD graphics processing units
The following is a list that contains general information about GPUs and video cards by AMD, including those by ATI Technologies before 2006, based on official specifications in table-form.
Field explanations
The headers in the table listed b ...
References
{{AMD graphics
AMD graphics cards
Computer-related introductions in 2015
Graphics processing units
Graphics cards