ASUS is working on an ROG MATRIX graphics card based on AMD's "new" Radeon R9 280X chip. Pictured below, the card features a meaty triple-slot cooling solution, and the same PCB as the one ASUS' HD 7970 MATRIX is based on, featuring a gargantuan 20-phase VRM, with TweakIT and ProbeIT mojo, fan panic switch, and dual BIOS. The card is expected to feature factory-overclocked speeds of 1100 MHz core, and 6.00 GHz memory. Given that these are pictures of a retail card, with its packaging, one can expect ASUS to launch the card along with its other SKUs, when the R9 280X is generally available.

AMD FX-9370, which has been available only through the OEM channel, could soon be generally available in its PIB (processor-in-box) packaging. The chip will bear the retail SKU "FD9370FHW8KHK," and retail at a price point that's just under $270 (excl. taxes). There's no clarity on whether the PIB package will include a cooling solution, given that the chip retains the 220W TDP figures from other FX-9000 series parts, such as the FX-9590. Based on the 32 nm "Vishera" silicon, the FX-9370 is an eight-core socket AM3+ processor based on the "Piledriver" micro-architecture. It features out of the box clock speeds of 4.40 GHz, with 4.70 GHz maximum TurboCore frequency. It features 16 MB of total cache (L2 + L3).

Online retailers are beginning to take pre-orders for AMD's Radeon R9 290X Battlefield 4 Edition bundle, which combines an R9 290X graphics card, with a Battlefield 4 Premium copy, which gives you access to not just the game, but its entire trunk of expansion packs. The bundle is sold directly by AMD, and doesn't bear any AIB partner markings. Swedish retailer Webhallen.com listed the bundle for 7,299 SEK (including all applicable taxes and shipping), which roughly converts to US $1,145. The store page also mentions that it will begin shipping the pre-orders on the 11th of October, 2013. Based on the 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the Radeon R9 290X features 2,816 GCN stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. It features full support for DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and Mantle.

AMD is planning a market release of three of its key sub-$300 graphics card SKUs, the Radeon R9 280X, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R7 260X, on the 8th of October, 2013. The three should be available for purchase on that date, and online reviews of the three should go live. AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners will launch non-reference design boards based on the three, although reference design boards should also be available. The Radeon R9 290X flagship part, on the other hand, should launch around October 15 in Europe (October 14 in the US by time conversion).

With AMD detailing its Radeon R9 and R7 series, especially at some very attractive sub-$299 price-points for the most part, there are jitters being felt at NVIDIA. The company is expected to unveil one or two new sub-$250 GeForce GTX SKUs around mid-October, 2013. The company is also expected to introduce price-cuts across its entire lineup, to make it competitive with AMD's. NVIDIA could tap into its existing GK104 and GK106 silicons to carve out the two new SKUs ranging between $149.99 and $249.99. The idea here would be to topple Radeon R9 270X. Price-cuts could be directed at the likes of GeForce GTX 760 and GTX 770, to make them competitive with the Radeon R9 280X, while in anticipation of the $599 pricing of the R9 290X, NVIDIA could rethink pricing of its $650 GeForce GTX 780, and $1000 GTX TITAN.

AMD today announced SAPPHIRE Technology as its exclusive global distribution partner for AMD FirePro professional graphics. An international supplier and leading manufacturer of innovative technologies, SAPPHIRE has successfully collaborated with AMD for more than a decade, managing AMD products in various markets and acting as an AMD FirePro professional graphics channel partner in Asia.

The distribution partnership will be beneficial in driving stronger support for AMD FirePro professional graphics by delivering new distribution resources to AMD's channel ecosystem companies worldwide.

Radeon R9 290X is looking increasingly good on paper. Most of its rumored specifications, and SEP pricing were reported late last week, but the ones that eluded us were clock speeds. A source that goes by the name Grant Kim, with access to a Radeon R9 290X sample, disclosed its clock speeds, and ran a few tests for us. To begin with, the GPU core is clocked at 1050 MHz. There is no dynamic-overclocking feature, but the chip can lower its clocks, taking load and temperatures into account. The memory is clocked at 1125 MHz (4.50 GHz GDDR5-effective). At that speed, the chip churns out 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth, over its 512-bit wide memory interface. Those clock speeds were reported by the GPU-Z client to us, so we give it the benefit of our doubt, even if it goes against AMD's ">300 GB/s memory bandwidth" bullet-point in its presentation.

Among the tests run on the card include frame-rates and frame-latency for Aliens vs. Predators, Battlefield 3, Crysis 3, GRID 2, Tomb Raider (2013), RAGE, and TESV: Skyrim, in no-antialiasing, FXAA, and MSAA modes; at 5760 x 1080 pixels resolution. An NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN was pitted against it, running the latest WHQL driver. We must remind you that at that resolution, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs tend to behave a little differently due to the way they handle multi-display, and so it may be an apples-to-coconuts comparison. In Tomb Raider (2013), the R9 290X romps ahead of the GTX TITAN, with higher average, maximum, and minimum frame rates in most tests.

AMD has now let loose the second beta version of the Catalyst 13.10 graphics driver. The Beta2 features support for Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, and HD 7000 Series desktop cards and HD 5000M, HD 6000M, HD 7000M and 8000M Series mobile GPUs, and is available for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 systems. Download links are just below.

• AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows
• AMD Mobility Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows (64-bit)
• AMD Mobility Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows (32-bit)

At a local press gathering in Turkey, AMD revealed the launch date of its next high-end product, the Radeon R9 290X. The press NDA over the card will end on October 15, 2013, at 12:01 AM EST (Berlin time). This NDA expiry time was disclosed in the slides that AMD showed the press. There's always the possibility that the NDA expiry date doesn't match market availability. It could merely mark NDA expiry for the press to post reviews of their AMD reference-design R9 290X (the only kind of R9 290X that will be initially available). AMD is handling R9 290X launch much in the same way NVIDIA handled the GTX TITAN, in that there won't be non-reference design cards in the foreseeable future, with the exception of cards with factory-fitted full-coverage water-blocks.

AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X, could strike a US $599.99 (or 499.99€, £399.99 before taxes) price-point, turning up the heat on the more expensive offerings by NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 780 and GTX TITAN. The card should be available from mid-October. Based on the new 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the card is expected to feature 2,816 GCN stream processors, spread across 44 SIMDs (11 computing units). Other specifications include 172 TMUs, 44 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory, which likely achieves its >300 GB/s memory bandwidth with a 5.00 GHz memory clock. The company is expected to launch 6 GB variants of the card a little later.

Although Radeon R9 280X has a lot in common with Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, AMD's AIB partners are expected to come up with entirely new board designs. A case in point is the XFX Double Dissipation card, pictured below. While we don't know if XFX is recycling PCB designs over from the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the cooler certainly looks new, with its tall and chunky aluminium fin heatsink that's fed by copper heat-pipes, and a pair of 100 mm fans. Its box speaks of an "unlocked voltage" feature.

Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti XTL" silicon, Radeon R9 280X features 2,048 GCN stream processors, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 3 GB of memory. The GPU is expected to be clocked a notch above 1.00 GHz on XFX' card, and the memory around 6.40 GHz. Slated for October 3rd, the card is expected to be priced anywhere between $299 and $329.

AMD partnered with PC gaming social network and clan-base service Raptr to launch its very own PC game settings optimization app that rivals NVIDIA's GeForce Experience. Named Gaming Evolved, the app takes a slightly different approach to finding the right settings for games, than GeForce Experience. While NVIDIA has dedicated teams of people running games through countless combinations of hardware to find the optimal settings for a given hardware configuration, Gaming Evolved relies on Raptr's 16-million strong community. Raptr clients relay anonymous game settings and hardware configuration data to Raptr. The best settings for given hardware configurations are pulled out of that data, through collaborative filtering. In addition to one-click optimization of game settings (a la GeForce Experience), the app gives you three of its own presets unique to your hardware - "best quality," "best performance," and "balanced." Raptr released the first public beta of the app, which can be downloaded from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Gaming Evolved by Raptr (beta)

At its spot in AMD's GPU'14 tech day, EA-DICE confirmed to major technical features of Battlefield 4, one of the hottest online multiplayer shooters of the season. To begin with, the game will include 64-bit binaries that let the game take advantage of vast amounts of system- and video-memory. 8 GB of system- and 3 GB of video-memory are part of the game's recommended system requirements list. The next big feature is a DirectX 11.1 renderer, which takes advantage of shader tracing, and seamless switching between various DirectX feature levels. DirectX 11.1 is exclusive to Windows 8 (and above), and isn't fully implemented on GeForce GTX 600 series GPUs.

DICE did announce that there are fallbacks to both. Out of data pulled by Origin, DICE claims that 91 percent of Battlefield 3 players run 64-bit operating systems, which encouraged their 64-bit move, but the game should also include fallbacks to 32-bit for the remaining 9 percent. The percentage of gamers running DirectX 11.1-ready GPUs and Windows 8 (and above) will no doubt be a small percentage, and for them not much should be lost. Battlefield 4 should launch on October 29. In December, the studio plans to roll out a major update that includes support for a new 3D graphics API built by DICE, codenamed "Mantle."

Here's a quick recap of AMD's updated product stack, spread between the R9 and R7 series. This article can help you understand the new nomenclature. AMD's lineup begins with the Radeon R7 250 and Radeon R7 260X. The two are based on the 28 nm "Curacao" silicon, which is a variation of the "Pitcairn" silicon the previous-generation Radeon HD 7870 was based on. The R7 250 is expected to be priced around US $89, with 1 GB of RAM, and performance rated at over 2,000 points by 3DMark Firestrike benchmark. The R7 260X, features double the memory at 2 GB, higher clock speeds, possibly more number crunching resources, Firestrike score of over 3,700 points, and a pricing that's around $139. This card should turn up the heat against the likes of GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost.

Moving on, there's the $199 Radeon R9 270X. Based on a chip not much unlike "Tahiti LE," it features 2 GB of memory, and 3DMark Firestrike score of over 5,500 points. Then there's the Radeon R9 280X. This card, priced attractively at $299, is practically a rebrand of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with. It features 3 GB of RAM, and over 6,800 points on 3DMark Firestrike. Then there are the R9 290 and R9 290X. AMD flew dozens of scribes thousands of miles over to Hawaii, and left them without an official announcement on the specifications of the two. From what AMD told us, the two feature 4 GB of memory, over 5,000 TFLOP/s compute power, and over 300 GB/s memory bandwidth. The cards we mentioned are pictured in that order below.More pictures follow.

AMD today announced that its Singapore subsidiary, Advanced Micro Devices (Singapore) Pte Ltd. (AMD Singapore), has completed a transaction to sell and lease-back its Singapore facility located at 508 Chai Chee Lane, Singapore 469032 to HSBC Institutional Trust Services (Singapore) Limited, in its capacity as trustee of Sabana Shari'ah Compliant Industrial Real Estate Investment Trust (Sabana REIT). The transaction generated proceeds of approximately SG$59 million Singapore dollars (US$46 million) net of all fees. AMD will record a gain of approximately US$16 million related to the transaction in the third quarter of 2013. AMD Singapore will continue its operations in a portion of the Singapore facility and has commenced a 10-year lease agreement with Sabana REIT with extension options.

The sale of AMD's Singapore facility is in keeping with AMD's strategy to reduce investments and capital in non-core parts of the business, including real estate. AMD launched operations in Singapore in 1984 and remains committed to the site as a vital part of the company's global operations. In 2012, AMD Singapore completed its transformation from a high-volume manufacturing site to an engineering center of excellence and currently employs approximately 500 people.

At its press meet called to unveil its next-generation graphics lineup, which lasted for about 3 hours and 45 minutes, a full one hour was spent detailing TrueAudio, an audio DSP that AMD co-developed with GenAudio, makers of AstoundSound technology; both of which are brand names we'd heard for the first time, and that's coming from someone who's been an audiophile and follower of PC audio technology for 15 years now. Here are a few reasons why the concept of TrueAudio, or at least the way AMD and its newfound GenAudio pals explained it, is unconvincing to the extant of flagging "snake oil." While we did not attend GPU'14, experiencing TrueAudio is irrelevant to our analysis. It focuses on what "yet another" positional audio DSP has to do with GPU, and how AMD is getting ahead of itself with non-graphics features in exactly the same way it criticized NVIDIA of doing, not too long ago.

AMD announced the new Radeon R9 290X, its next-generation flagship graphics card. Based on the second-generation Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture, the card is designed to outperform everything NVIDIA has at the moment, including a hypothetical GK110-based graphics card with 2,880 CUDA cores. It's based on the new "Hawaii" silicon, with four independent tessellation units, close to 2,800 stream processors, and 4 GB of memory. The card supports DirectX 11.2, and could offer an inherent performance advantage over NVIDIA's GPUs at games such as "Battlefield 4". Battlefield 4 will also be included in an exclusive preorder bundle. The card will be competitively priced against NVIDIA's offerings. We're awaiting more details.

AMD's approach to the next-generation product stack isn't structured too differently from that of NVIDIA's current. The company is launching just one big (high-end) chip, codenamed "Hawaii," based on which it's launching the Radeon R9 290X. It's been detailed to death in our older posts. The Radeon R9 280X, on the other hand, is we're hearing a re-badged Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. At the most, expect a slight clock speed bump, and a different reference-design board, but for the most part, it's shaping up to be identical. The approach draws parallels with the NVIDIA's lineup. The Radeon R9 290X is expected to compete with the GeForce GTX TITAN, R9 290 with GTX 780, and R9 280X with the GTX 770. While launch of the R9 290 series will be tightly controlled by AMD (i.e., don't expect non-reference designs for a while), the R9 280X will launch entirely by non-reference designs. The three cards will launch a little later this week.

AMD revealed that EA's highly-anticipated online shooter, Battlefield 4, is an AMD Gaming Evolved title, in the run up to its GPU'14 event, slated for later today. It also hints at the possibility of Battlefield 4 being part of an upcoming "Never Settle" bundle that's exclusive to buyers of the Radeon R 200 series. What does this translate to in the real world? Radeon HD 7700 series and above, and the upcoming Radeon R 200 series, feature 100% support for DirectX 11.1, which Battlefield 4 is rumored to take advantage of, on PCs running Windows 8 (and above). It could translate to better performance or visual effects.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) today announced the publication of VESA's Display Identification Data Standard (DisplayID) version 1.3. Delivering on the Association's promise to create standards that address emerging trends in display technology--including higher resolutions and pixels per inch (PPI)--the latest version of DisplayID now includes support for resolutions at 4K and beyond, tiled display topologies, stereo 3D formats and additional timing standards.

"Every day, increasing transmission rates, video resolutions, PPI and processing capabilities are making new display capabilities available to consumers. Our vision for DisplayID was to define a standard that can easily keep pace with a rapidly expanding universe of display options," said Syed Athar Hussain, display domain architect for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and VESA vice-chairman. "With DisplayID, video sources-like computers, game consoles, cable boxes and video players-can easily discover the capabilities of the monitors they are connected to, enabling an automatic and seamless user experience between devices."

In addition to the Radeon R9 290X pictured earlier today, AMD will also be unveiling the Radeon R7 260X upper mid-range graphics card. Pictures of the card were leaked to the web. At the moment, we have no clue as to what chip the card is based on, but we're hearing two codenames, "Curacao" and "Bonaire XTX." "Curacao," in our best guess, is a variant of "Pitcairn." "Bonaire XTX" could be a higher-performing variant of the "Bonaire" silicon AMD launched the Radeon HD 7790 with. Given the way components are arranged behind the GPU, we're inclined to believe the card pictured below is based on "Curacao." Gotta give AMD marks for trying out something different with the cooler shroud design.

Here are the first pictures of AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. If the naming caught you off-guard, our older article on AMD's new nomenclature could help. Pictured below is the AMD reference-design board of the R9 290X. It's big, and doesn't have too much going on with its design. At least it doesn't look Fisher Price like its predecessor. This reference design card is all that you'll be able to buy initially, and non-reference design cards could launch much later.

With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.It gets better, the source also put out benchmark figures.

AMD today announced its role in the much-anticipated major motion picture sequel "Machete Kills." Written and directed by award-winning Robert Rodriguez of Quick Draw Studios, "Machete Kills" sees actor Danny Trejo reprising his role as the international spy known as Machete.

The film plot centers around Machete's mission to help the President of the United States, played by Carlos Estevez -- better known as the actor Charlie Sheen -- take down an international crime ring. To help get the job done, Machete and his counter-surveillance team rely on systems powered by AMD technology, which are featured in the film.

Here are the first set of specifications for AMD's next high-end GPU silicon, on which the company will no doubt carve out several SKUs from. Codenamed "Hawaii," and slated for unveiling on the 26th in, well, Hawaii, the 28 nm chip is what AMD will take NVIDIA's GK110 silicon head-on with. It is based on AMD's second-generation Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture.

With an estimated die-area of 430 mm² (18% bigger than "Tahiti,") the chip physically features 2,816 stream processors (SPs) spread across 44 clusters with 64 SPs each (a 37.5% increase over "Tahiti"). The chip features four independent raster engines, compared to two independent ones on "Tahiti." This could translate into double the geometry processing muscle as "Tahiti," with four independent tessellation units. The memory interface of the chip is expected to be 384-bit wide, based on the GDDR5 specification. Given the way TMUs are arranged on chips based on this architecture, one can deduce 176 TMUs on the chip. The ROP count could be 32 or 48. The chip will feature hardware support for DirectX 11.2, including the much hyped shared resources (mega-texture) feature.

AMD posted Catalyst 13.9 WHQL software suite, which is logo-certified for Windows 8.1, and Catalyst 13.10 Beta for everyone else. Catalyst 13.9 Windows 8.1 driver is logo-certified (i.e., it complies with the newest Windows Display Driver Model 1.3), yet the it isn't quite WHQL-certified. You're at the very least assured that the driver will make your hardware work on Windows 8.1, and support Direct3D 11.1 on compatible Radeon HD 7000 series, HD 8000 (OEM) series, and the upcoming Rx 2xx series hardware. Direct3D 11.1 should get its first major outing with Battlefield 4.

Catalyst 13.9 for Windows 8.1 supports all AMD Radeon GPU families since HD 5000 series, and integrated graphics for all APUs AMD ever sold. The new Catalyst Control Center requires .NET 4.5 runtime environment. Moving on, Catalyst 13.10 Beta is being released to users on older operating systems. It brings game-specific performance improvements, including 20% performance scaling on Rome Total War 2 for CrossFire setups and display corruption issues associated with it; 20% performance scaling on Saints Row 4 for CrossFire setups; and 10% performance scaling on Metro: Last Light for CrossFire setups. Frame-pacing (fluidity) is improved for six games, including Tomb Raider (2013), Metro: Last Light, Sniper Elite V2, World of Warcraft, Max Payne 3, and Hitman: Absolution. The driver also fixes a bug that spools down PCIe link speeds of secondary graphics cards in CrossFire setups down to x1, when idling.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.9 WHQL (64-bit) | AMD Catalyst 13.9 WHQL (32-bit) | AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta