After a couple of months off due to a very busy fall product season, we?re finally back again with our monthly guide to video cards and video card industry recap. Since our last guide it has been a busy couple of months, so there's quite a bit to cover.

The big news this fall has of course been the new video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA. While October has been a relatively quiet month, both companies kept September busy by pushing new products out the door and took others off the shelves.

AMD for their part released the first of their GCN 1.2 architecture GPUs: Tonga. Tonga serves as AMD's replacement for the nearly 3 year old Tahiti GPU, the very first of AMD's GPUs first launched in 2011. Tonga is an interesting ? if still slightly mysterious ? GPU, as we suspect we have not seen everything it and GCN 1.2 can offer. From a high level GCN 1.2 is a further refinement on the GCN architecture, bringing with it greatly improved Delta Color Compression for graphics buffers, a faster video decode block (H.264 L5.2 support), and a further optimized geometry frontend that better handles extreme tessellation factors. At the same time we suspect there are some compute/HSA improvements in the design that AMD has not disclosed and are being saved for the rumored Carrizo APU, Kaveri's successor.