Rumour: AMD R9 285 Launches September 2nd, Announcement 23rd August

The rumour mill has spun up once again to give us some more information about AMD’s R9 285 graphics card. The new GPU from AMD which is to be based on the Tonga silicon will reportedly get launched on September 2nd. The R9 285, or Tonga Pro, will be launched first and then R9 285X, Tonga XT, will launch later in September. But fear not, you won’t have to wait until September 2nd to see if this rumour is true because it is reported that an announcement will be made about the product as soon as August 23rd.

What should we expect with Tonga and its two variants? Well current speculation suggests it will be AMD’s most power efficient GPU design yet, to ease concerns that Nvidia’s Maxwell will be able to trump AMD’s offerings – AMD is expected to reveal that this isn’t the case. At the live event on August 23rd AMD could also have some Direct X 12 and Mantle related announcements ready, but for now we are more interested in the fact the R9 285 will be in the mix.

For those who can’t remember the R9 285 is expected to have the following specs: 1792 stream processors based on the GCN 1.1 design, 32 ROPs, 112 TMUs, a 256 bit memory bus, 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a TrueAudio DSP and CrossFire XDMA support. The expected TDP is just 150W which is incredibly efficient given the slower R9 280 has a 200W TDP, and the R9 280X has a 250W TDP. The R9 285 and R9 285X are designed to challenge Nvidia’s upcoming higher-end Maxwell parts by offering competitive pricing and vastly improved power efficiency.

Source: WCCFTech

Image courtesy of Videocardz