The video board said to use two Tonga graphics processing units might not be released after all, despite reports

Sep 18, 2014 06:24 GMT  ·  By

AMD released the Radeon R9 285 graphics card earlier this month (September 2014), a video board based on the Tonga graphics processing unit and featuring a price of $249 / €190 - €249. This caused people to look on in anticipation for when the R9 285 X2 would debut.

You see, AMD did really well earlier this year, when it launched the Radeon R9 290 X2, a high-end dual-GPU video board with a performance more or less similar to that of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan Z but half the price.

That means it sells for $1,500 / €1,500 rather than $3,000 / €3,000, while offering the same benefits.

It is for this reason that many people expected the Radeon R9 285 X2 to do something similar on the market. Or maybe offer one better. You see, NVIDIA is getting ready to launch graphics cards based on the Maxwell architecture. High-end graphics cards called GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970.

AMD's presumed response to NVIDIA Maxwell

A dual-Tonga graphics card would presumably work better than the GTX 980, but sell for the same amount of cash, or close enough.

NVIDIA's graphics cards will be based on the Maxwell GM204 graphics processing unit, with GM204-200 powering the GTX 970 and GM204-400 for the GTX 980.

Now, though, AMD has more or less debunked each and every report about a Radeon R9 285 X2 coming to market. Or maybe it just decided to cancel the thing. Essentially, AMD told a tweeter that it wasn’t releasing anything other than the R9 285.

Now, theoretically this would make some sense. After all, there is no point in making a “cheap” dual-GPU card when you can make your own powerful high-end, single-GPU adapter.

However, AMD isn't expected to release something quite as powerful as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 in the near future (unless those murmurs about a Radeon R9 390X aren't just rumors). Also, AMD's tweet suggests that the other board it is supposed to reveal, the Radeon R9 285X (and equal to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970), won't come out either.

The conclusion

Not quite clear what all this means. Maybe AMD has reached the conclusion that the Tonga GPU just isn't as good as they hoped. Maybe it won't quite match the GeForce GTX 970 at its $330 / €330 price point, despite the 2,048 stream processors inside (only 1,729 SPs are active in R9 285).

There is still the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding or a deliberately misleading marketing statement meant to cause a hype-raising fuss (in which case, it worked). We probably won't know for sure until the last week of September, when NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and AMD's Radeon R9 285X are supposed to come forth.