The Radeon R5/R7/R9 300 series is a series of Radeon graphics cards made by Advanced Micro Devices. All of the GPUs of the series are produced in 28 nm format and use the Graphics Core Next micro-architecture. The GPUs are based on the Fiji architecture. Some of the cards of the series include the flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X along with the Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon R9 Nano, which are the first GPUs to feature High Bandwidth Memory technology, which AMD developed with SK Hynix; HBM is faster and more power efficient than GDDR5 memory. However, the remaining GPUs in the series are based on previous generation GPUs with revised power management and therefore only feature GDDR5 memory. The Radeon 300 series cards including the R9 390X were released on June 18, 2015. The flagship device, the Fury X, was released on June 24, 2015, with the dual-GPU variant, the Radeon Pro Duo, being released on April 26, 2016.
The R9 380 along with the R9 Fury & Nano series were AMD's first cards 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 ASICs 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 branded on-die display controllers were introduced in September 2009 in the Radeon HD 5000 Series 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 1.1 and later products.
A completely new feature to the lineup allows users to reduce power consumption by not rendering unnecessary frames. It will be 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. A particular focus is on dual GPU setups where each GPU will now render for one eye individually of the display.
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 to native resolution. This process is an alternative to supersampling which is not supported by all games. Virtual super resolution is similar to Dynamic Super Resolution, a feature available on competing nVidia 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. or 1.2 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 with GCN Architecture. Vulkan 1.1 will be supported with actual drivers in 2018. On newer drivers Vulkan 1.1 on Windows and Linux is supported on all GCN-architecture based GPUs. Vulkan 1.2 is available with Adrenalin 20.1 and Linux Mesa 20.0 for GCN 2nd Gen Ort higher.
AMD Catalyst is being developed for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of July 2014, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the AMD FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers. AMD Catalyst supports all features advertised for the Radeon brand.
The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on and for Linux, but have been ported to other operating systems as well. Each driver is composed out of five parts:
a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for X.Org Server, which is finally about to be replaced by Glamor
The free and open-source radeonkernel driver supports most of the features implemented into the Radeon line of GPUs. The radeon kernel driver is notreverse engineered, but based on documentation released by AMD. This drivers 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 is still undergoing development, but can be used on a few supported Linux distributions already. 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 sourceamdgpu kernel driver. Pre-GCN GPUs are not supported.
