AMD announces R9 285 graphics card, shipping early September

By Mike Flacy Published August 24, 2014

Announced earlier today during AMD’s ‘30 years of graphics’ celebration day, the hardware company will be releasing a new mid-range graphics card on September 2, 2014. Called the Radeon R9 285, the card is succeeding the previous Radeon R9 280 and will utilize the Tonga Pro GPU system. AMD claims that the card outperforms the Nvidia GTX 760 and is designed to allow gamers to play recently released “PC games at maximum detail.” This card will be positioned between the 2GB R9 270 / 270X series and the 3GB R9 280X card.

Related: AMD Radeon R9 295×2 review

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According to AMD, the new R9 285 offers up to 3.29 teraFLOPS of computing performance at a clock speed up to 918MHz. The stock card utilizes 2GB of GDDR5 memory running across a 256-bit interface, but a couple third party manufacturers will release variants of the card with 4GB of memory. One aspect of the card that’s been improved over the previous R9 280 card is the power draw. The R9 285 has a power draw of 190 watts versus the 250 watts that’s prevalent in all other cards in the R9 lineup.

amd-radeon-r9-285-specs — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Typical of the other R9 cards, the R9 285 will offer a full length display port, two DVI outputs, and an HDMI port. AMD is expected to launch the card on September 2, 2014 at a $249 MSRP. In addition to the release of the new card, AMD will be packaging new bundled games with the entire lineup of R9 cards.

Related: ASUS Radeon R7 250X review

Calling the bundle the ‘Never Settle: Space Edition’ promotion, two games included with the purchase of a new card will be ‘Alien Isolation’ and ‘Star Citizen.’ ‘Alien Isolation‘ is a reboot of sorts on the Alien franchise of games, set 15 years after the original ‘Alien’ movie. Combining survivial horror and stealth, players will be following the story of Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s character in the first film.

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