AMD Radeon R9 295X2: the world’s fastest graphics card

Say hello to my little friend – the AMD Radeon R9 295X2. According to AMD, this will be the world’s fastest and most powerful graphics card when it is launched later this month.

Before you say, “but what about the GTX Titan Z?“, AMD have benchmarked this card against competing cards already available to consumers, and the Titan Z is only expected to hit the market at the end April 2014, too.

Before we get into all the magical numbers and stats, we need to discuss the most important figure first; the price. Local pricing is yet to be confirmed, but it will sell for $1499 (around R15,500) in the states.

Price aside, the R9 295X2 is a dual-GPU card that boasts some impressive stats and performance figures.

In a a 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark test in 1080p – conducted by AMD – the R9 295X outperformed the Titan Black (Nvidia’s highest performing graphics card as of 12 March 2014) by a score of 15,862 to 9,878 in the performance preset, and 8,764 to 4,725 using the Extreme preset. The tests was conducted using an Intel i7 4960X CPU, 16GB RAM, Nvidia driver 334.89, AMD Catalyst driver 14.10, and Windows 8.1 system.

The air and liquid cooling combo is another standout feature of the card, with Asetek working with AMD on the project to get the set up just right. AMD promises “cool temperatures, quiet operation and consistently high performance, right out of the box” thanks to this dual-cooling solution.

Here are the R9 295X2’s basic specs.

Stream Processors	2 x 2816
Texture Units	2 x 176
ROPs	2 x 64
Core Clock	n/a
Memory Clock	5GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	2 x 512 bit
VRAM	2 x 4GB
FP64	(1/8)
Transistor Count	2 x 6.2b
Typical Board Power	500w
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm
Direct X Support	11.2
Launch Date	21/4/2014
Price	$1499 (R15 500)

The card will also allow gamers to run “ultra settings” in 4k resolution, or combine 5 HD screens using AMD Eyefinity.

To get an idea of the card’s power, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry put the card through its paces with the following frame rate tests. (2560 x 1440 resolution)