You can now buy the world's fastest graphics card

The Radeon Pro Duo, which AMD has billed as the world's fastest graphics card, is now available for those with deep enough pockets.

The much anticipated dual-GPU video card is priced at $1,499 (around £1,030, or AU$1,940) and is aimed at VR content creators as well as PC gaming enthusiasts with high-end rigs.

According to AMD's benchmarking the new Radeon is 1.5 times faster than the GeForce GTX Titan X, and 1.3 times faster than the R9 295X2.

In 4K gaming benchmarks the Pro Duo easily outdid the Titan X, hitting 83.3 fps and 81.6 fps in GTA V and Battlefield 4 respectively, compared to 50.5 fps and 49.7 fps for Nvidia's card. In Far Cry Primal, it was 59 fps playing 35 fps in favor of the AMD graphics card.

There was an even more pronounced difference when it came to a DX12 title, Ashes of the Singularity, in 4K with maxed-out settings, with the Pro Duo recording 52.8 fps compared to 26.7 fps which the GeForce Titan Z managed. Twin Titan X cards in SLI hit 37.7 fps, but AMD's new board was still 40% faster than this.

Raw power

AMD says the Pro Duo boasts a compute performance of 16.38 Tflops and has 8192 stream processors across 128 Compute Units, with 512 Texture Units and a clock speed of up to 1000MHz.

You get 8GB of HBM video RAM on board with a dual 4096-bit memory interface, and the board utilizes three 8-pin power connectors supping 350W worth of juice.

In terms of ports, there's an HDMI connector along with three DisplayPorts, and closed loop liquid cooling keeps the card's temperature down along with a 120mm Nidec fan.

The Pro Duo also benefits from LiquidVR tech to maximize virtual reality performance, including tricks like asynchronous shaders to reduce latency or stuttering and provide a smoother experience all round.

As you may have previously seen, AMD has kicked off the VR First Initiative which wants to set up virtual reality labs featuring Pro Duo cards in universities across the globe, to drive forward with VR content creation.

• Also check out: 10 best graphics cards in the world