AMD R9-285 Tonga - Quick Review

AMD is celebrating its 30 years of graphics manufacturing nowadays and tomorrow on 2nd September AMD announced their new AMD R9-285 GPU codenamed Tonga powered with improved GCN Architecture having support for Mantle and DirectX 12. Let's take a look on the specifications of GPU.

                         AMD Radeon R9-285 is packed with 2 GB GDDR5 Video Memory, 918 Base Clock and 1350 Mhz Core Clock Speed. It has 256-Bits memory bus with 176 GB/s Memory Bandwidth and total of 1792 Shader Processing Units. It has maximum power consumption of 190 Watts. The R9-285 is expected to give  performance almost equal to R9-280X for Full HD and 2k gaming with the price of 200$.

                                    So now let's compare the R9-285 with it's family, The R9-280 and R9-280X. R9-285 is packed with Tonga GCN 1.2 Architecture while R9-280 and 280X are based on Tahiti GCN 1.1 Architecture. Video Memory of R9-285 is 2 GB while the other GPUs of R9-28x Family has 3 GB VRAM. Base Clock is higher than others but memory clock is in higher than R9-280 and lower than R9-280X. Number of Shader Processing Units is same in R9-280 and R9-285. The Memory Bus of R9-285 is 256-Bit while that of R9-280 and R9-280X is 384-Bit. This also results in R9-285 having lower Memory Bandwidth. But packed with better Architecture and memory efficiency R9-285 performs better than R9-280 and very close to R9-280X in practical performance. 

Graphics Processor	R9-280	R9-285	R9-280X
Video Memory	3072 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB
Memory Bus	384-Bit	256-Bit	384-Bit
Memory Bandwidth	240 GB/s	176 GB/s	288 GB/s
Base Clock Speed	827 Mhz (933 Mhz Boost Clock)	918 Mhz	850 Mhz (1000 Mhz Boost Clock)
Memory Clock Speed	1250 Mhz	1375 Mhz	1500 Mhz
Shader ProcessingUnits	1792 SPUs	1792 SPUs	2048 SPUs
Power Consumption	250 Watts	190 Watts	200 Watts
Price	299$	250$	225$

Benchmarks :-