AMD Unveils Next-Generation Radeon Graphics Cards, On-GPU Audio Processing, Proprietary Mantle API

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday introduced its all-new Radeon graphics cards as well as new family of graphics processing units. The new R9- and R7-series of GPUs -- which will be available at price-points from $89 to $599+ -- will not only improve performance, but will also introduce a set of new graphics, audio and compute-related capabilities.

The new AMD Radeon R7 and R9 families of graphics chip feature three key pillars: AMD GCN architecture with tweaks that adds support for DirectX 11.2 application programming interface; AMD TrueAudio technology, a fully programmable audio engine that is supposed to provide incredible level of programmability to developers whish is supposed to result in cinema-like positional audio in video games; as well as a set of optimizations for ultra high-definition 4K (3840*2160) output.

AMD Radeon R9 290X top-of-the-range graphics chip, which consists of over 6 billion of transistors, is capable of achieving 5GFLOPS of single-precision performance, the fastest single GPU in the industry. The graphics cards boasts with whopping 300GB/s memory bandwidth. The new flagship graphics processor from AMD is made using 28nm process technology.

AMD pins a lot of hopes on its TrueAudio technology for real-time positional audio processing using computational capabilities of the latest GPUs. Since the TrueAudio is fully programmable, it will now be possible for game designers to add realism to their games, provided that they are interested and the implementation does not serious affect their schedules. One of the first titles to take advantage of AMD TrueAudio will be this year's Thief by Eidos, Lichdom by Xaviant, Murdered Soul Suspect by Square Enix/AirTight and Star Citizen by Cloud Imperium Games. AMD TrueAudio will be initially available on AMD Radeon R7 260X, R9 290 and R9 290X graphics boards.

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