MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G review

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A new Island and Technology

The AMD refresh lineup

So as you guys know, AMD has been respinning their GPUs quite a bit, the oldest one is 3 years old, the Tonga GPU as reviewed today has actually already been with us for a year and a half, you know it as the GPU used in the Radeon R9 285, albeit it uses the latest iteration of the GPU. For a quick refresh here's an overview.
 

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So AMD doesn't like these codenames mentioned, but here's a quick breakdown:

  • The Hawaii GPU used on the Radeon R9 290X is now used in the Radeon R9 390X but rebranded to Grenada. This series is positioned against the GeForce GTX 970.
  • The R9 285 is Tonga, which is now the R9 380, this chip will now be renamed to "Antigua" and is positioned against the GeForce GTX 960. Tonga/Antigua does offer Direct3D feature-level 12.0 support.
  • The Radeon R7 270 series (First Pitcairn (aka Radeon 7800 released three years ago) then called Curacao) will be the 370 series tagged as Tobago. The 260 (Bonaire) is gonna be the 360 series. And so on.
  • The one new chip is of course Fiji, it will get two SKUs, based on a Pro and XT GPU model. We expect a liquid cooled version, and likely a lower clocked less specced Pro model with air-cooling of some sort. Probably just one SKU will launch initially though. 
 

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Radeon R9 285 (Tonga)

  • Stream Processors 1792
  • Clock Frequency up-to 918 MHz
  • 3.29 TFLOPS compute performance
  • 2 GB memory at 5.5 Gbps / 256-bit
  • 190W TDP
  • PCIe 3.0
  • API - DirectX 12 / OpenGL 4.3 / Mantle

Radeon R9 380 (Tonga aka Antigua)

  • Stream Processors 1792
  • Clock Frequency up-to 1 GHz
  • 3.4 TFLOPS compute performance
  • 2 GB / 4 GB memory at 5.5 Gbps / 256-bit
  • 190W TDP
  • PCIe 3.0
  • API - DirectX 12 / OpenGL 4.3 / Mantle

The Radeon R9 380 has 1792 activated stream processors making it perform close to and positioned against the GeForce GTX 960.

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The GPU architecture has remained the same though comparable towards the last-generation products, AMD still uses the 28nm process technology, the cards are PCIe gen 3 compatible and there have been significant changes on power consumption. We'll address all the features separately of course. With the launch of the R7 and R9 series you will also see Eyefinity updated towards version 2.0 DDM, audio is now fully supported (you hear audio on the actual monitor it's played on), the 5x1 landscape mode is introduced, and you may now create custom multi-monitor resolutions.
 

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Interesting is that AMD implemented next generation digital multipoint audio with smart channel splitting. So if you set up Eyefinity with three screens the six speakers in your monitors will now be configured as front left/mid/right channels. Very clever.
 

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Eyefinity
 - you can mix and match any monitor (similar monitors) output and create an Eyefinity setup. So if you have three of the same monitors you could hook up one to HDMI, one to DVI and one to DP. 

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