Announced over the summer when AMD was celebrating their 30 years of graphics celebration was the Radeon R9 285, a $250 graphics card built on the company's latest GCN graphics processor technology to replace the Radeon R9 280. We finally have our hands on a Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" for delivering the first look at its Linux performance.

The Radeon R9 285 offers roughly the same performance as the Radeon R9 280 while at the same price. However, for the Radeon R9 285 comes a new GPU compared to the R9 280 being derived from the three-year-old Tahiti GPU. The Radeon R9 285 is powered by AMD's Tonga GPU and is the first GPU on the market using the GCN 1.2 architecture revision. The GCN 1.2 "Volcanic Islands" revision features better performance improvements (particularly for tessellation), a new video encoder/decoder, and an updated ISA that's more efficient.