The AMD Radeon R9 270X

AMD Radeon R9 270X

The Radeon 200 series was a different kind of launch from AMD than anything we’ve seen from them before. The slow development of the next generation of manufacturing processes from fab partner TSMC has required both AMD and NVIDIA to get a bit creative in how they want to roll out products, along with how they want to promote and position those products. Whereas in previous years we’d seen one or both firms roll out a number of new GPUs, 2013 will be the year where we only see one new GPU from each, and those GPUs were at the high-end. This hasn’t prevented AMD from bringing around new products or bringing down the price-to-performance ratio of their lineup, but it has required a different kind of launch than what they would do in previous years.

For AMD, the new reality of doing another product cycle at 28nm has meant that AMD’s product plans for the end of 2013 and 2014 have involved a lot of shifting of GPUs and prices. GCN is an architecture with long legs, and the GPUs cut from it being equally as long legged. So the company has set forth on a plan to introduce a new high-end GPU for the top of their market (the 290 series), while the mainstream and lower markets will receive new products based on existing GPUs. We’ve already seen the first step of that process with the launch of the Radeon R9 280X, and now we’re ready to take a look at the next step with the Radeon R9 270 series.

The Radeon R9 270 series is composed of two products, the 270X and the 270, with the X indicating the higher performing part in AMD’s new naming scheme. The 270X actually launched almost a month ago – a result of the 200 series launch blast its repurposed GPUs – while we’re just now catching up to the 270 series today, with the launch of the lower tier R9 270. Both of these parts are based on AMD’s venerable Pitcairn GPU, which post-shuffle is being moved from AMD’s $200+ enthusiast cards to their sub-$200 mainstream cards. They are in essence the successors to the 7870 and 7850, the previous video card family that Pitcairn called home