While everyone was paying attention to Square Enix and Nintendo, AMD took to E3 to announce the release of their new 300 series graphics cards. The new "Fiji" class GPU will be used in the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury and the water-cooled R9 Fury X, featuring new High-Bandwidth Memory. Priced at $550 and $650 respectively, the cards are intended to compete with Nvidia's new top of the line graphics cards, the GTX 980 Ti.
The water-cooled nature of the Fury X will allow for some heavy overclocking, for enthusiasts willing to amp up the performance of their rig.
The company is also releasing a new smaller 6-inch graphics card called the R9 Nano that has half the power of the older R9 290X in a much smaller size.
As can be seen in the specifications sheet above, the Fury and Fury X feature 4096 stream processors and 8.9 billion transistors, powering 8.6 teraflops of performance while running at 1050 MHz. The new High-Bandwidth Memory allows them three times the performance-per-watt of the older GDDR5 memory, while using 94 percent less PCB surface area.
Officially, the R9 Fury will be available in retail stores on July 14, while the watercooled Fury X will enter markets on June 24–that's this month. Nano is set to arrive later this summer, and the dual-GPU Fury will be available in the fall.
In addition to the R9 Fury cards, AMD is also releasing the R7 360, R7 370, R9 380, R9 390, and R9 390X. All of these cards are upgrades over the 200 series cards, but you'll want to pick up an R9 Fury or R9 Fury X if you're in the market for some serious gaming.
