AMD introduces RADEON for 1080p gaming

After weeks of predictions and reports about it, the latest graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is finally ready to land in people’s computers, or to be used in totally new systems as the situation demands.

AMD will spend most of 2013 expanding its Radeon 7000 series of GPUs, and today it made good on that commitment by announcing an incremental evolution, the Radeon HD 7790, priced at $149.

“We want to augment and solidify the [7000] product stack, and we’ll do that through the 7790,” Evan Groenke,graphics product manager at AMD, said during a pressbriefing earlier this week.

The 7790 is based on a slick new piece of silicon, Groenke said, making this a never-before-seen GPU to add to the chipmaker’s already well-selling 7000 repertoire.

Based on AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, the chip is built on the promise of delivering excellent 1080p performance for a market that’s become saturated with the mode.

“1080p is the minimum bar these days,” Groenke noted, and AMD aims to have the 7790 dominate the field.

AMD, however, tried to make up for a lack of clock speed, 1GHz, by doubling the processor’s PowerTune Technology. In doing so, AMD claims it’s created the first discrete chip to oscillate between eight DPM states. This allows for higher sustained engine clocks, greater performance and improved power efficiency, AMD explained.

In as little as 10 milliseconds, the 7790 can switch between an octagonal bunch of clock/voltage DPM pairings.

AMD also loaded the chip with 896 stream processors (14 compute units in all, four more than the 7770 model), a typical power draw of 85W and 1GB GDDR5 memory.