AMD made great strides back in January of 2012 when it released the first GPU to use the GCN architecture. Codenamed ?Tahiti XT? that GPU was the Radeon HD 7970, it was built using 4.3 billion transistors squeezed into a 352 mm2 die. This allowed for 2048 cores and a fill rate of 32 Giga-pixels per second.

After a long 22 month wait AMD re-released the Radeon HD 7970 as the Radeon R9 280X giving it a familiar codename ?Tahiti XT2?. Performance wise they were virtually the same. In fact due to a reduction in clock speeds the R9 280X was slightly slower, reducing the fill rate to 27.2GP/s.

The R9 280X did take advantage of the GCN 1.1 upgrades, which included AMD TrueAudio and a revised version of AMD's Powertune technology. The key difference being after 22 months the MSRP dropped from $550 to just $300, a depreciation of just $11 per month.