AMD Radeon R9 285

AMD’s new Tonga core works well in most of our gaming tests: it beats the GTX 760 in most of our games, albeit sometimes by tiny margins, and it’s no worse than its rival when it can’t pull ahead. It’s comparable in price to the GTX 760, and comes with free games. It’s our new favourite sub-£200 graphics card, albeit by the slimmest of margins.

AMD's new Tonga core works well in most of our gaming tests: it beats the GTX 760 in most of our games, albeit sometimes by tiny margins, and it's no worse than its rival when it can't pull ahead. It's comparable in price to the GTX 760, and comes with...

AMD's $249 Radeon R9 285 delivers modern features (such as support for TrueAudio and FreeSync) found on other AMD cards, and performance that edges out Nvidia's GeForce GTX 760. But given its familiar specs, it won't significantly outpace the Radeon R9...

AMD's MSRP for the R9 285 is $249, and we expect the Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC to retail for around $260, which isn't too bad, but not good enough to take over the market. Right now, you can find GTX 770 cards discounted to an amazing $275, and these cards are significantly faster, quieter, and more power efficient.

A good $250 replacement for the Radeon R9 280 that doesn't up the ante when it comes to game performance, but adds new features and lower power usage to the mix.

As unexcited as this conclusion might sound, the Radeon R9 285 2GB still looks to be the best graphics card you can buy for $250.

De geteste Sapphire kaart laat verder een prima indruk achter en is zonder meer een goede keus wanneer je een R9 285 overweegt.

The competitive $249 price point just became that much more competitive. If you need or want the features of FreeSync, TrueAudio, and Mantle, these features are now available to you in this price range where these were not before with previous Tahiti models. We look forward to evaluating more R9 285 cards. Hopefully there will be some very high factory overclocks cards, and potential for high manual overclocking which will be very exciting.

All things considered, the Radeon R9 285 seems like a winner. It’s not an unequivocal improvement over the existing Radeon R9 280, but it does compete very favorably with its NVIDIA-based opposition and the new features integrated into the Tonga GPU are welcome additions as well.

What I personally find most interesting about the R9 285 is its Tonga core, and what that could mean for future AMD products. The exact codename for this card is Tonga Pro, and it’s been heavily rumored that a Tonga XT is en route, a card that should bump things back up to 3GB, as well as match the 2048 cores of the 280X. These cards, coupled with whatever NVIDIA has en route, is going to make this fall an interesting one.