AMD Confirms They Are Putting Finishing Touches on 300 Series

AMD-finishing-touches-300

Ask any digital media expert and they’ll all agree that social media is a hugely powerful tool to communicate with your audience. It isn’t just a tool to sell your product, but to interact with your ‘fans’ and to tell them what cool stuff you’re working on.

With the recent fiasco concerning Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 970 not quite having the memory specs (or ROPS or Level 2 cache) advertised, a frustrated user went to AMD’s FaceBook and asked the company a straight up question – when could he grab the R9 390X or R9 380X.

“I just sold my GTX 970,” he began, “and I really want to know if either the R9 390X or the R9 380X is coming before GTA V PC release. Hope you reveal new one soon or I otherwise might be GTX 980.”

An official AMD rep used the page to respond and said “Hey mate, we don’t have an official date to share just yet but the second we know, we will definitely announce it on Facebook.”

Less than an hour later, there was a follow up reply “We’re still putting the finishing touches on the 300 series to make sure they live up to expectation. Can’t wait to reveal them though. We’re pretty excited.”

The finishing touches are being put on the Radeon 300 series, according to AMD
The finishing touches are being put on the Radeon 300 series, according to AMD

While it’s not exactly an official release date, it does tie up rather nicely with the latest rumors that AMD’s new GPU’s will indeed be seeing a Q2 2015 release. It’s unknown which of the 300 series cards will reach customers first – for example, we could end up seeing the R9 380X prior to the R9 390X, but it’s a confirmation they’re coming soon.

As we’ve discussed in our rumor roundup, there have been a few sightings of engineering samples being shipped through India, and a couple of online retailers have listed the GPU’s, only to pull them down rather sharpishly. That, plus supposed engineering sample benchmarks of the R9 300 series popping up tells us that they’re close.

The frustrating thing now is just waiting for them to appear. AMD don’t want to rush the release and risk screwing up the launch with bugs, poor drivers or otherwise faulty hardware though. Customer’s typically remember the first set up benchmarks they see – so if AMD release a card that doesn’t have optimized drivers and the card is losing 20 percent of its performance, those numbers are what the customer remember. So it’s better for customers, AMD and us (tech websites) if AMD take the extra time.

I’m sure we’ll have the R9 390X in our PCIe slots soon enough!