AMD finally unveiled its new line of 300-series graphics cards

If you’ve been keeping up with hardware news over the past few months then you’re familiar with AMD’s upcoming 300-series graphics cards, which will be the first to use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This essentially means that AMD can make GPUs that’re smaller than current cards while still being more powerful. After months of rumors and speculation, the company finally unveiled these new graphics cards at its E3 press event last night. 

AMD has officially announced its latest line of video card at its E3 2015 press conference. At the entry level is the R9 360, an extremely small card. Pricing was skipped. The next step up, the R7 370, was quoted at a $150 MSRP and “up to” 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Taking a step up we have the R9 380 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory at $200, the R9 390 at $330 and the R9 390X at $430. AMD did not quote the architectures in these cards, but given that it also did not talk about new chips inside them, they are likely re-brands of existing hardware. All of the cards will support DirectX 12. The real news, though, is Fiji, the company’s new architecture, which uses High Bandwidth Memory. To do that, CEO Dr. Lisa Su came on stage. She started by introducing the liquid-cooled Radeon R9 Fury X, which she says offers a 50 percent improvement in performance per watt over previous high-end Radeons. It will be joined by a less powerful, but equally efficient, air-cooled model called the R9 Fury. The Fury X will arrive on June 24th at $650, and the Fury will appear on July 14 at $550.