AMD today announced the AMD Radeon R7 260, an entry-level GPUpositioned to fill in the gap between the Radeon 260X and 250 models. The AMD Radeon R7 260 graphics card is based on AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and supports Mantle, AMD's technology aimed at enabling game developers to design games which can harness the GCN-powered cores of PCs and game consoles.

Compared to the R7 260X, which is a fully enabled Bonaire part, the R7 260 features two less CUs, bringing the SP count down to 768 SPs and the texture unit count down to 48. Clockspeeds have also been decreased, with 260 topping out at 1GHz for the GPU clock and 6GHz for the memory clock. This puts theoretical performance at around 80% of 260X in GPU-intensive applications and 92% in memory-intensive applications.

	AMD Radeon R9 270	AMD Radeon R7 260X	AMD Radeon R7 260	AMD Radeon HD 7770
Stream Processors	1280	896	768	640
Texture Units	80	56	48	40
ROPs	32	16	16	16
Core Clock	900MHz	?	?	1000MHz
Boost Clock	925MHz	1100MHz	1000MHz	N/A
Memory Clock	5.6GHz GDDR5	6.5GHz GDDR5	6GHz GDDR5	4.5GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
VRAM	2GB	2GB	1GB	1GB
FP64	1/16	1/16	1/16	1/16
TrueAudio	No	Yes	Yes	No
Transistor Count	2.8B	2.08B	2.08B	1.5B
Board Power	150W	115W	95W	100W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	GCN 1.0	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.0
GPU	Pitcairn	Bonaire	Bonaire	Cape Verde
Release Date	11/13/13	10/11/13	01/15/14	02/15/12
Price	$179	$139	$109	$159

The new card also features 1GB of VRAM versus 2GB on the 260X.

AMD's official specifications state that power consumption for 260 is 95W, down from 115W on 260X.

The 260 will launch mid-January at an MSRP of $109, according to AMD. AT that price, it is expected to compete with NVIDIA's GTX 650 and GTX 650 Ti models.