When AMD introduced their latest top model graphics card the Radeon 290X, rumours started surfacing very quickly about AMD working on a dual GPU version of their latest chips. As AMD has marketed a dual GPU card of their high end GPU's over the last years the prediction of a new dual GPU card is not a hard one to make. The rumors and codename "Vesuvius" that surfaced in november 2013 have proven to be correct, as today AMD introduces their Radeon R9 295X, basically two Radeon 290X on one PCB with water cooling.

The Radeon R9 295X2 is the latest in a long range of AMD dual GPU cards, after the AMD Radeon HD 7990, AMD Radeon HD 6990, ATI Radeon HD 5970, ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 and, for people with long memories, the ATI Rage Fury Maxx. The introduction of its predecessor, the 7990, was not the best that AMD could have had. A few weeks before AMD introduced it nVidia provided hardware sites with a FCAT-benchmark, that showed that a lot of the frames rendered by the second GPU were not shown properly on the screen. nVidia managed to damage the card's reputation before it was even officially on the market.