Radeon R9 390X Could Cost $700+ USD
Our friends at Heise.de are reporting from CeBIT 2015 that the Radeon R9 390X could sell for over $700 USD -- a heck of a lot of money for a consumer-grade, single-GPU graphics card.
The R9 390X "Fiji" will be AMD's new top-end graphics card while the Radeon R7 360, R7 360X, R9 370, R9 380, R9 380X, and R9 390 will be the other expected models.
The R9 390X will command a $700+ price for top-of-the-line performance while the R9 380X is reportedly expected to sell for around $400 and the R9 380 for around $330. It's not yet known though exactly when the R9 300 series is launching. German Phoronix readers can learn more via Heise.de.
It will be interesting to see if the R9 390X does really end up being $700+ and makes us quite excited for the rest of the Rx 300 series, assuming the Linux support lines up... AMD hasn't released an updated Catalyst Linux driver in three months (sans an early beta posting to Canonical) and their new open-source "AMDGPU" DRM kernel driver has yet to appear that's needed for supporting the Radeon R9 285 and the forthcoming Radeon Rx 300 series and Carrizo APUs. We were told this new kernel driver would likely start surfacing in the winter but we have yet to see that happen. The AMD R9 285 Tonga that's been available for over a half-year now is thus left without any open-source driver support at the moment until this new kernel driver appears.
If AMD were to publish this new kernel driver in the very near future, it could potentially be merged for Linux 4.1. However, even for Linux 4.1 this is still way out of reach for having an out-of-the-box experience for new AMD GPUs within Ubuntu 15.04, Fedora 22, and other non-rolling-release distributions. For most of these distributions, the next hope is not until next fall/winter for their next six month updates -- by then the Rx 300 series will almost be out in full -- for having a good, out-of-the-box experience. Meanwhile thanks to Intel's Linux investments, already with the spring distribution releases we're seeing initial Skylake open-source graphics support.
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