Gamers and those watching the microprocessor industry closely were in for a surprise when AMD used the occasion of its ’30 years of graphics’ celebration day to announce it would release Radeon R9 285 mid-range graphics card on September 2.

The new card succeeds its predecessor Radeon R9 280 on the Tonga Pro GPU system, according to reports. AMD, which competes with Intel and Nvidia, said its new offering – priced at $249 – would outperform Nvidia’s GTX 760 and allow gamers to play newly released PC games at “maximum detail.”

The new card will be positioned between the 2GB R9 270 / 270X series and the 3GB R9 280X card. The specs of R9 285 include 3.29 teraFLOPS of processing power at 918MHz, with 2GB of GDDR5 memory – with some retailers offering 4GB option – on a 256-bit interface.

The R9 285 power draw of 190 watts is lower than the 250 watts of other cards in the R9 series. AMD will offer new games in bundles with its R9 card lineup, the company said, calling the promotion ‘Never Settle: Space Edition’ and including games ‘Alien Isolation’ and ‘Star Citizen.’ The former is “a reboot of sorts on the Alien franchise of games, set 15 years after the original ‘Alien’ movie,” Digital Trends reported.

“The AMD Gaming Evolved program is committed to making games look great and run well for all PC gamers,” Ritche Corpus, director of ISV Gaming and Alliances, AMD, said in a press release. “By working with truly talented developers like Creative Assembly, we deliver on that commitment with fun and beautiful games like ‘Alien: Isolation,’ which give PC gamers the high-end technology they deserve.”