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AMD's graphics card comeback: the new R7 series, R9 series and Mantle
It's been a tricky couple of years for AMD's graphics card division. Not because the last batch of Radeon HDs were bad, but because the competition's offerings were often better -- and because improvements in integrated graphics have hurt demand for discrete GPUs in general. However, as was revealed a couple of weeks back, AMD has a plan. The company's latest R7 and R9 cards don't only notch up the FLOPs, but also come with support for something called "Mantle" -- a programming tool which unifies game development across PCs and consoles, and which promises superior visual performance so long as developers make AMD-specific versions of their games to exploit it. We'll look at Mantle in greater detail in a moment, but for now what matters is that all of AMD's new cards support it -- from the lowliest R7 240 right up to the huge R9 290X -- and that's why they're each worthy of a detailed breakdown.
