AMD made great strides in January when it realeases its first GCN

AMD made great strides in January 2012 when it released its first GCN-based GPU. Codenamed 'Tahiti XT', the Radeon HD 7970 squeezed 4.3 billion transistors onto a 352 mm2 die, allowing for 2048 cores and a fill rate of 32 gigapixels per second.

After a long 22 month wait, AMD re-released the HD 7970 as the R9 260X (aka 'Tahiti XT2'), though the newer card actually offered less performance as it came with a slightly slower clock speed that ultimately reduced the fill rate from 32 to 27.2GP/s.

AMD showed its final Radeon 200 series graphics card a year later, but neither the price nor the performance of the R9 285 'Tonga Pro' was noteworthy. Instead, it was this GPU's adoption of the latest GCN 1.2 architecture that raised eyebrows, though truth be told, few eyebrows were actually raised. The only products that made the Radeon 200 series worth remembering were the Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X. They took the GCN 1.1 architecture and expanded the die to include more cores and a wider memory bus.

With GCN 1.2 providing no real performance edge over the first two versions, we've been wondering what AMD's next move would be. After all, it's now been three and a half years since GCN was first introduced.

Surprisingly -- or perhaps unsurprisingly for the cynics among us -- that next move is yet another round of rebadged Radeons.

Since these first Radeon 300 series GPUs are rebranded, AMD is ripping the band aid off quickly by releasing them all together versus trickling them out over the next few month. Today's launch brings the Radeon R9 390X, R9 390, R9 380, R7 370 and R7 360.

The R9 390X is the R9 290X with twice the VRAM (this seems unnecessary) that is clocked a bit higher alongside a slightly higher core frequency. On paper this means a 5% increase in GP/s and a 20% greater memory bandwidth.

The R9 390 is much the same, being a clone of the R9 290 with twice the VRAM as well as higher core and memory clock speeds.

The R9 380 is the R9 285 with a few minor upgrades, but performance-wise the R9 380 shouldn't be much faster than the 3.5 year old HD 7950 as they both have the same core configuration. The R9 380 has a core and memory clock speed advantage but it also suffers one major disadvantage, which we'll get to shortly.

We had lingering hopes for truly updated GPUs, but what's old is new again at AMD so say hello to a familiar family of Radeons.