AMD GPU Review

AMD’s latest graphics card, the Radeon R9 285, uses a brand-new core, dubbed Tonga. The R9 285 is designed to replace the R9 280 as well as bring the fight to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760, and it should play every game at 1080p and 1440p – although 4K will likely be beyond its abilities. AMD Radeon R9 285: Under the Hood The R9 285 is the only card to currently use the Tonga core. It’s a mid-range core, but it shares a crucial part of its architecture with AMD’s high-end 290-series parts, with the 1,792 stream processors split into a quartet of shader engines. That means the R9 285 has double the engines of the 280 it replaces – a move that should improve performance in a host of areas, from geometric and tessellation performance to general compute tasks. Tonga’s high-end DNA bodes well for ga...