Unfortunately, it was quickly discovered that instead of these cards being an upgrade, as most AMD-faithful customers were hoping for, it seems we’ll just be getting a rebrand of the current lineup installed with all the same parts as before.
Though we won’t go through all the changes here, some of the new names to note include the R9 285 now being dubbed the “R9 380,” the R7 260x masquerading as the R9 360, and the R9 270 jumping a hundred impressive, if meaningless, points up to the R9 370.
All three rebrands are based on chip architectures that are identical to those of their predecessors, which means that AMD is likely just trying to spur sales of old technology before they move on to the next core architecture sometime later this quarter.
It’s only rumor and conjecture at this point, but the company is expected to have a huge debut of a new chip that will supposedly feature everything from FreeSync support to new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) implementations, and will blow the rest of its product line clean out of the water.
Currently though, all the cards getting a fresh tag on their collar are built off AMD’s 28nm fabrication process. This still leaves them in the running with Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs at the peak of the current Maxwell rollouts.
While HP customers may not be as savvy when it comes to a ruse of this type, it’s harder to fool hardcore gamers, who do their homework on this sort of thing. Only time will tell if AMD faces any harsh feedback on this, but considering that Nvidia’s done it before as well, it’s unlikely anyone but the most die-hard of fans will really raise a ruckus.
