AMD’s Next-gen is (Mostly) Here: R9 280X, R9 270X, R7 260X & R7 250

It’s that time of year again – no, not the fall, but rather the time for a fresh GPU launch. This one comes courtesy of AMD, with its first GPUs in quite some time to not use an “HD” moniker. Today’s launch is more of an evolutionary one, being that the GPUs are based on the same silicon as the last-generation cards, but AMD has brought forth some performance boosts and other niceties to sweeten the deal.

We’re running a bit behind on our launch article, but anticipate having a look at the R9 280X posted later today. AMD inundated us at an inopportune time, especially since we just revised our GPU test suite to include 8 games and 4 different resolutions for mainstream cards and higher. Delayed, but hopefully worth the wait.

Here’s a brief look at AMD’s current-gen lineup:

The 290 and 290X fall into a separate launch window, so the specs for either are being kept under wraps for the time-being. I can say that they are worth waiting for though, as they bring along a small surprise.

As I am soon to get to writing our look at the 280X, I won’t go into great detail in this post, but did want to get something up to show that we’re alive and well. After our 280X look goes live, we’ll later in the week tackle the 270X and 260X, and past that, we’ll dive into third-party cards. Thanks to all of this benchmarking, I’m finally getting caught up on Breaking Bad, so big kudos to AMD for that.