The Radeon 300 series is a series of graphics processors developed by

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

. All of the GPUs of the series are produced in 28 nm format and use the

Graphics Core Next Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was lau ...

(GCN) micro-architecture. The series includes the Fiji and Tonga GPU dies based on AMD's GCN 3 or "Volcanic Islands" architecture, which had originally been introduced with the Tonga based (though cut-down) R9 285 slightly earlier. Some of the cards in the series include the Fiji based flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, cut-down Radeon R9 Fury and small form factor Radeon R9 Nano, which are the first GPUs to feature

High Bandwidth Memory High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network ...

(HBM) technology, which AMD co-developed in partnership with

SK Hynix SK Hynix Inc. () is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. SK Hynix is one of the world's largest semiconductor vendors. Founded as Hyundai Electronics in 1983, SK Hynix was integrated into ...

. HBM is faster and more power efficient than GDDR5 memory, though also more expensive. However, the remaining GPUs in the series outside the Tonga based R9 380 and R9 380X are based on previous generation GPUs with revised power management, and therefore only feature GDDR5 memory (something Tonga does as well). The Radeon 300 series cards including the R9 390X were released on June 18, 2015. The flagship device, the Radeon R9 Fury X, was released on June 24, 2015, with the dual-GPU variant, the Radeon Pro Duo, being released on April 26, 2016.

Micro-architecture and instruction set

The R9 380/X along with the R9 Fury & Nano series were AMD's first cards (after the earlier R9 285) to use the third iteration of their GCN instruction set and micro-architecture. The other cards in the series feature first and second gen iterations of GCN. The table below details which GCN-generation each chip belongs to.

Ancillary ASICs

Any ancillary

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

s present on the chips are being developed independently of the core architecture and have their own version name schemes.

Multi-monitor support

The

AMD Eyefinity AMD Eyefinity is a brand name for AMD video card products that support multi-monitor setups by integrating multiple (up to six) display controllers on one GPU. AMD Eyefinity was introduced with the Radeon HD 5000 series "Evergreen" in September ...

branded on- die

display controller A video display controller (VDC), also called a display engine or display interface, is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing ...

s were introduced in September 2009 in the

Radeon HD 5000 series The Evergreen series is a family of graphics processing unit, GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices for its Radeon line under the ATI Technologies, ATI brand name. It was employed in Radeon HD 5000 graphics card series and competed directly w ...

and have been present in all products since.

AMD TrueAudio

AMD TrueAudio was introduced with the AMD Radeon Rx 200 series, but can only be found on the dies of GCN 2nd gen and later products.

Video acceleration

AMD's SIP core for video acceleration,

Unified Video Decoder Unified Video Decoder (UVD, previously called Universal Video Decoder) is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1. UVD was introduced wit ...

and Video Coding Engine, are found on all GPUs and are supported by AMD Catalyst and by the open-source Radeon graphics driver.

Frame limiter

A new feature to the lineup allows users to reduce power consumption by not rendering unnecessary frames. It is user configurable.

LiquidVR support

LiquidVR is a technology that improves the smoothness of virtual reality. The aim is to reduce latency between hardware so that the hardware can keep up with the user's head movement, eliminating the

motion sickness Motion sickness occurs due to a difference between actual and expected motion. Symptoms commonly include nausea, vomiting, cold sweat, headache, dizziness, tiredness, loss of appetite, and increased salivation. Complications may rarely include ...

. A particular focus is on dual GPU setups where each GPU now renders for one eye individually of the display.

Virtual super resolution support

Originally introduced with the previous generation R9 285 and R9 290 series graphics cards, this feature allows users to run games with higher image quality by rendering frames at above native resolution. Each frame is then

downsampled In digital signal processing, downsampling, compression, and decimation are terms associated with the process of sample rate conversion, ''resampling'' in a multi-rate digital signal processing system. Both ''downsampling'' and ''decimation'' can b ...

to native resolution. This process is an alternative to

supersampling Supersampling or supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing method, i.e. a method used to remove aliasing (jagged and pixelated edges, colloquially known as "jaggies") from images rendered in computer games or other computer p ...

which is not supported by all games. Virtual super resolution is similar to Dynamic Super Resolution, a feature available on competing

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

graphics cards, but trades flexibility for increased performance.

OpenCL (API)

OpenCL accelerates many scientific Software Packages against CPU up to factor 10 or 100 and more. Open CL 1.0 to 1.2 are supported for all chips with Terascale and GCN Architecture. OpenCL 2.0 is supported with GCN 2nd Gen. and higher. For OpenCL 2.1 and 2.2 only Driver Updates are necessary with OpenCL 2.0 conformant Cards.

Vulkan (API)

API Vulkan 1.0 is supported for all GCN architecture cards. Vulkan 1.2 requires GCN 2nd gen or higher with the Adrenalin 20.1 and Linux Mesa 20.0 drivers and newer.

Chipset tables

Desktop models

Mobile models

Radeon Feature Matrix

Graphics device drivers

Proprietary graphics device driver Catalyst

AMD Catalyst is being developed for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. As of July 2014, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the

AMD FirePro AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/GPGP ...

brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers. AMD Catalyst supports all features advertised for the Radeon brand.

Free and open-source graphics device driver `radeon`

The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on and for

, but have been ported to other operating systems as well. Each driver is composed out of five parts: # Linux kernel component

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militair ...

# Linux kernel component

KMS driver The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations s ...

: basically the device driver for the

# user-space component libDRM # user-space component in

Mesa 3D Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open-source software, open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware ...

# a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which ...

, which is finally about to be replaced by Glamor The free and open-source radeon kernel driver supports most of the features implemented into the Radeon line of GPUs. The radeon kernel driver is ''not''

reverse engineered Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

, but based on documentation released by AMD. This driver still requires proprietary microcode to operate DRM functions and some GPUs may fail to launch the X server if not available.

Free and open-source graphics device driver `amdgpu`

This new kernel driver is directly supported and developed by AMD. It is available on various Linux distributions, and has been ported to some other operating systems as well. Only GCN GPUs are supported.

Proprietary graphics device driver AMDGPU-PRO

This new driver by AMD was still undergoing development in 2018, but could be used on a few supported Linux distributions already (AMD officially supports Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS). The driver has been experimentally ported to ArchLinux and other distributions. AMDGPU-PRO is set to replace the previous AMD Catalyst driver and is based on the free and open source amdgpu kernel driver. Pre-GCN GPUs are not supported.

References

{{AMD graphics AMD graphics cards Computer-related introductions in 2015 Graphics processing units Graphics cards