AMD's Radeon R9 290X Launched, Faster Than GeForce GTX 780 For Roughly $100 Less

MojoKid writes "AMD has launched their new top-end Radeon R9 290X graphics card today. The new flagship wasn't ready in time for AMD's recent October 8th launch of midrange product, but their top of the line model, based on the GPU codenamed Hawaii, is ready now. The R9 290 series GPU (Hawaii) is comprised of up to 44 compute units with a total of 2,816 IEEE-2008 compliant shaders. The GPU has four geometry processors (2x the Radeon HD 7970) and can output 64 pixels per clock. The Radeon R9 290X features 2816 Stream Processors and an engine clock of up to 1GHz. The card's 4GB of GDDR5 memory is accessed by the GPU via a wide 512-bit interface and the R290X requires a pair of supplemental PCIe power connectors—one 6-pin and one 8-pin. Save for some minimum frame rate and frame latency issues, the new Radeon R9 290X's performance is impressive overall. AMD still has some obvious driver tuning and optimization to do, but frame rates across the board were very good. And though it wasn't a clean sweep for the Radeon R9 290X versus NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 780 or GeForce GTX Titan cards, AMD's new GPU traded victories depending on the game or application being used, which is to say the cards performed similarly."

Comments

Looking good so far.

[Chas]

Now let's hope to god they have their driver situation hashed out.

AMD/ATI has always put out fairly nice hardware. But, more often than not, they're always falling on their faces because of shoddy drivers.

Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you use a titan to do modelling that requires double precision. The titan is a super cheap k20x. It just happens to double as a gaming card.

Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less

[Salgat]

The Titan was never meant to be competitive based on price/performance. It's not a fair comparison.

the way games were meant to be played

[sayfawa]

Nothing useful to say here, but since I know this will turn into an AMD vs Nvidia thing, I just wanted to share how sick I am of those frickin' unskippable 3-second-long Nvidia promos that play every damn time I start half of my games. That's the only thing I have against them, but it's starting to be really irritating.[/firstworldproblems]

Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less

[Nemyst]

Irrelevant. The Titan was never meant to be a consumer-level card, it's something that's meant to be sitting between the consumer (sub-700) market and the professional (1000+) cards. Its performance is within 10% of the GTX780, which makes it a bad buy even amongst NVIDIA cards. The real reason to buy one is that it has full speed double-precision, whereas all the consumer cards are significantly slower (an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards).

I'm not saying that the whole slowing down double-precision stuff is great, but it really is an apples to oranges comparison. If you're a gamer, there's no reason to grab a Titan whatsoever.

Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs

[XaXXon]

I'll be excited about this "mantle" thing when I actually see stuff that benefits from it instead of a bunch of theoretical mumbo jumbo.

Graphics API overhead this.. 10x more draw calls that..

Show me a real game and show me how it's actually better than the alternatives that actually exist at that same time. "Look this thing that doesn't really exist (or isn't in use) is faster than stuff that's actually here now and being used". Everyone can win at that game.

Real numbers on real games. Until then, you can keep your Mantle to yourself.

Nethack doesn't have this problem

[billstewart]

On the other hand, watching TV directly at abc.com has annoying commercial breaks :-)