AMD's mainstream Radeon graphics cards could support more potent memory, but never had a chance to
AMD’s Tonga GPU powers some great mainstream Radeon graphics cards, including the R9 380, which we recently hailed as the best card you could get for $200. But it was AMD’s November release of the $230 R9 380X that was supposed to show the full power of Tonga, with all possible stream processors unlocked and firing away.
But even that card wasn’t Tonga running on all cylinders. Last Thursday night, AMD confirmed to PC Perspective that the Tonga GPU was capable of a 384-bit memory width bus even though all Tonga-based cards came packing a 256-bit bus. AMD says it was never able to find that sweet spot of price and performance to offer a card with Tonga fully unleashed.
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