It’s not often we hear leaks regarding a graphics card that was supposed to be released two years ago. This time around, however, details of AMD’s unreleased Radeon R9 285X graphics card have surfaced.
The never before seen Radeon R9 285X graphics card was first spotted by a user from Overclock.net forums called ZealotKi11er, which was then reported by folks at VideoCardz. What makes this discovery interesting is the fact that two years ago, this graphics card was almost surely going to be released by AMD, only for it to be allegedly canceled a month after the release of the R9 285.
AMD’s Radeon R9 285X graphics card represents more than just a graphics card that was brushed aside due to the GPU architecture’s poor power efficiency; it’s said to the company’s most powerful single GPU Tonga-based graphics card ever made (Tonga XT).
According to specifications found on TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z, the Radeon R9 285X had a VRAM capacity of 3GB. When it comes to clock speeds, the graphics card had GPU and memory clock speeds of 1002MHz and 1375MHz respectively. Other specifications of the canceled graphics card include memory bandwidth speed of 264GBps, an ROP (render output units) count of 32, a 384-bit memory interface, along with a GDDR5 memory controller.
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Interestingly, the Radeon Radeon R9 285X found by ZealotKi11er was also tested using the 3DMark Time Spy benchmarking tool. The graphics card managed to attain a score of 3,277 (full details can be found here), which is higher than both the Nvidia GTX 960 and the recently released Radeon RX 460 graphics cards.
Despite all of this, the Radeon R9 285X will most likely never see the light of day now that AMD has more efficient graphics cards. Nonetheless, this finding still remains rather interesting because it somewhat represents what an unaltered, full-sized Tonga GPU is capable of.
(Source: Overclock.net via VideoCardz)
