AMD’s HD7000 family was confirmed earlier this year to be “stable throughout 2013” by AMD’s marketing and engineering department, which meant at the time that they had no plans to release a real successor to the ageing Radeon family. Recent reports now suggest that the next evolution in the family tree, HD9000, will be coming later this year and could be just in time for the launch of Battlefield 4.
The original story turned up on ChinaDIY, saying AMD was planning to launch the HD9000 family this year during Q4 2013, but has now been taken down. A Q4 2013 launch is close enough to the time frame expected for Battlefield 4 to launch, which MyGaming determined will be part of a future Never Settle bundle.
AMD Radeon HD7990 Malta
A new report by Russian tech site Overclockers.ru seem to match up to speculation that there is a launch coming this year. Sources close to Overclockers.ru have said that stocks of the Radeon HD7990 are in very short supply and will be discontinued very soon. It could certainly be a result of AMD dropping requirements for manufacturers to keep on making the reference design, but the timing is too close to be a mere coincidence.
This has been the longest time AMD’s gone without a new product refresh. The current HD7000 family was paper-launched in December 2011 with general availability two months later due to manufacturing issues. AMD chose to fit their cards with larger memory buffers and wider memory buses because they anticipated a change in the average desktop user’s performance requirements to drive monitors with a resolution larger than 1920 x 1080.
The company is working on fixing their issues with Crossfire stuttering and runt frames and should have working beta drivers out by the end of July 2013.
Sources: Overclockers.ru, Xbit Labs, ChinaDIY
More Hardware new:
SA gaming keyboard price roundup: backlighting on the cheap
Loading ...
