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

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

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."

87 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Suiggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    That should have been the real headline.

    1. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Suiggy · · Score: 2

      Many other consumer/gaming cards support double precision floating-point from both nVidia and AMD. Including all of the AMD R9 2xx cards. Double precision hasn't been exclusive to workstation GPUs for a while now.

    3. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Salgat · · Score: 1, Insightful

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

    4. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Fwipp · · Score: 2

      When they get beat on both axes, though - that makes it a fair comparison.

    5. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Nemyst · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Entropius · · Score: 4, Informative

      A lot of compute applications are memory bandwidth limited, so single precision will give you only twice as many flop/sec as double.

      There's another thing about the Titans, though: reliability.

      I do lattice gauge theory computations on these cards. We've got a cluster of GTX480's that is a disaster: the damn things crash constantly. We're in the process of replacing them with Titans, which have been rock solid so far, as good as the cluster of K20's I also use. (They're also a bit faster than the K20's.) The 480's are especially bad, but I imagine the Titans are better than (say) GTX580's.

      The Titan doesn't make that much sense as a high-end gaming card, but it makes a great deal of sense as a ghetto compute card for people who don't want to buy the K20's/K40's. (We've benchmarked a K40 and the Titan still beats it, but only barely.)

    7. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by etherelithic · · Score: 5, Interesting

      But NVIDIA's consumer oriented cards have very slow double precision processing, something like 1/16 the processing speed of single precision. And they even artifically hobbled the DP performance of the GTX 780, which is otherwise a slightly cut down Titan (i.e. big kepler). All of AMD's 79XX cards (and its rebranded brethren the 280X card), and the new 290X card have 1/4 DP performance. I've consistently bought AMD Radeon cards for my OpenCL applications because their $300 cards are almost as fast as NVIDIA's $1000 card, and in some cases faster, for DP calculations.

    8. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by XaXXon · · Score: 2

      What does that even mean? It's for sale and if you wanted that performance you had to pay $1000 for it. Now you don't.

      People who want that performance are sure going to be interested in learning they can pay half as much.

      The alternative is to say that nvidia has nothing with this performance, but then people are going to say "But the Titan does"... so what are you going to do?

    9. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I hate to be that guy but if the reviews are to be trusted, amd overclocked this thing to the very limit of the chip's potential just to beat the competition.
      There's almost no headroom for overclocking and stock, it's ridiculously hot, loud and power-hungry.
      For 400 bucks more, you got something that's still better in most games at a relevant resolution about 8 months ago.

    10. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by JDG1980 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The GTX Titan is a double-precision computing card that happens to do very well at gaming. It's not really a fair comparison. Ever since the GTX 780 was released, pretty much every review site has recommended it over the Titan for gamers on price/performance grounds.

    11. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      Mantle is on the way

      I have a little trouble understanding Mantle. Maybe I just picked the wrong articles to read, but will any 7xxx card be able to use Mantle or only the new ones?

      I saw a good deal on an HD7970 but I don't want it if it can't use this new Mantle stuff.

      Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna see how my 6850 handles Batman: Arkham Oranges. I was hoping to get a new card by now for this game, but I've been too confused to pull the trigger on a purchase.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    12. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Arkh89 · · Score: 4, Informative

      You're lucky then... We replaced our cluster of 580s by Titans and these things keep crashing for no apparent reason (about 2/3 of the cards will randomly hang up on computation are run fine on the remaining cards)...

    13. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by locopuyo · · Score: 1

      SLI Titans perform much better than SLI 780s. This is because a 780 actually has dual GPUs on a single card and Titan just has one.

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    14. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Other reviews show the thing can easily be pushed by another 10%, even without lifting the 40% fan speed restriction.

    15. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by GarethIwanFairclough · · Score: 1

      Mantle is on the way

      I have a little trouble understanding Mantle. Maybe I just picked the wrong articles to read, but will any 7xxx card be able to use Mantle or only the new ones?

      I saw a good deal on an HD7970 but I don't want it if it can't use this new Mantle stuff.

      Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna see how my 6850 handles Batman: Arkham Oranges. I was hoping to get a new card by now for this game, but I've been too confused to pull the trigger on a purchase.

      we're in a similar position. I'm on a 6850 atm. Looks like we're SOL when it comes to this mantle stuff!

      By the way, are you sure it wasn't "Arkham oranges and lemons"? I'm sure it was called that and that it involves the "mayor of simpleton" somehow.. Poor skeleton.

    16. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      HD69xx, HD79xx, R9 280 and R9 290 are all double-precision computing cards that happen to do very well at gaming.
      So it is a fair comparison.

    17. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by IllogicalStudent · · Score: 2

      I'm gonna see how my 6850 handles Batman: Arkham Oranges.

      I'm confused. I thought Slashdot was against GMO... or is WayneTech growing their oranges organically?

      Either way, mmmm, oranges!

      --
      But Maaa! Everyone else has a .sig !
    18. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Capt.Albatross · · Score: 1

      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.

      Is that marketing bullshit that I'm smelling?

      an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards.

      I don't think 'justify' is quite the right word here...

    19. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by gman003 · · Score: 1

      There's a difference between "supported" and "actually usable".

      The 780 has a theoretical single-precision compute rate of 4.0TFLOPS, comparable to the Titan's 4.5TFLOPS. Go up to double-precision, and the 780 plummets to 165GFLOPS (1/24th the power), while the Titan remains high at 1.5TFLOPS (1/3rd the power).

      I'm not sure what the exact reason for that discrepancy in performance is, whether it's an actual hardware difference, some hardware being disabled during binning, or even just a driver change (although someone would have patched drivers to work around it if it were just a driver thing by now), but it is a massive performance difference.

    20. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Entropius · · Score: 1

      Hm, interesting -- if we're going to get Titans as an upgrade this is worth knowing. What are you doing on them? We're doing a computation that uses a lot of single-precision, somewhat less double precision, and occupies about 70% of the 6GB memory on each (they run in pairs).

      Oh -- make sure you have the new drivers. I kept getting random crashes and it turns out that the old Linux Nvidia driver was at fault since it didn't really support them. I upgraded the drivers and everything was fine.

    21. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by fast+turtle · · Score: 2

      Now if AMD would give us back the Driver Only install instead of forcing .Net4 and Catalyst Control center down our throats. The driver is good but I don't need the damn CCC App crashing and restarting the video driver when it didn't crash.

      This is probably the biggest reason I no longer use AMD cards even though their as good performance wise as Nvidia. Or course Nvidia is having driver issues again so I guess I need to stick with Intel only for stable and open source drivers.

      --
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    22. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by default+luser · · Score: 1

      AMD designed this chip for maximum performance in minimum die space. They managed to cram Titan-level performance in 435mm^2. That's including a 512-bit memory bus AND 64 ROPs, so they're not exactly cutting corners!

      The Titan uses a 551mm^2 die-size, and although some of that is fused-off, the majority of the difference is because Nvidia designed it wide and slow for power first, performance second. This is because the part was targeted first-and-foremost at professionals, where performance/watt and cooler noise is actually a concern.

      By prioritizing die space over efficiency, AMD were able to offer their card at the $550 launch price-point. AMD is betting that hardcore enthusiasts won't care about power, especially when the card destroys the Titan at 4k resolutions. I guarantee you Nvidia could not make a profit at the same price, and that's why their reaction part (GTX 780 Ti) will be priced at $650.

      You can't expect companies to work miracles when all they have is the same old 28mn process. You can emphasize efficiency or die size, but you can't do both!

      --

      Man is the animal that laughs.
      And occasionally whores for Karma.

    23. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Arkh89 · · Score: 1

      I should be more precise on the context...
      We are mainly doing FFTs and Linear algebra in both single and double precisions. To give a little bit more details about the problem : we run the same code on multiple GPUs at the same time (each instance of the program has its own GPU and is not communicating with the other processes). It appears that, after a random number of iterations (it might be 1K, 10K or 100K), a kernel from CuFFT, or CuBLAS, or my own gets stuck and the program is killed by the watchdog of the driver.
      If it was a bug with the programs, the bug should happen for all GPUs (Titans, K20, C2070, 580s) and in fixed conditions (not at a random iteration, as each iteration does not have any different memory access than the previous one, no memory allocation, just values changing). But in the current conditions, it works well on all the K20, C2070 and 580 and sometime on the Titan too. Also, the programs were fully mem-checked and are rather simple (pure GPGPU computation). If it was a problem with the driver or the motherboard all computations should failed at some point which is not the case as sometime the program will work, even on the Titans. I also tried a large number of drivers in the 310-325 range, the 325 seems to give more stable run than the previous ones, but I still have crashes.

      What I cannot exclude : some (random) bad sync/timing/data link between motherboard (Supermicro) and the cards or some bit flip because of the card temperature near the memory modules (although the setup runs in a server room with a custom cooling system and show no temperature difference to other external benchmarks) or some remaining driver bug.

    24. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by Entropius · · Score: 1

      The memory is specialized and very fast -- graphics memory is orders of magnitude faster than a SSD. We're getting 160 GB/sec from the memory on a K20.

    25. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by OdinOdin_ · · Score: 1

      You run your program 3 times on 3 different hardware setups, get 2 complete results and compare results, which are the same ? The other computation did not complete.

    26. Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less by petteyg359 · · Score: 1

      I heard that was a complicated game.

  2. Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by Suiggy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mantle support, 4GB of VRAM, 512-bit memory bus for fast transfers... we're in heaven.

    With that much VRAM, there should be enough for a rich geometry buffer and room to spare for a decent sized scene represented by a sparse voxel DAG. Ray-cast the voxel DAG into the geometry buffer, then do your polygonal rendering pass, followed by your deferred lighting passes, and final composition.

    1. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by XaXXon · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by aliquis · · Score: 2

      Also redo these benchmarks in Linux ..

    3. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by Suiggy · · Score: 2

      >2013
      >still browsing 4chan

    4. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 1

      If you're interested, one thing to watch is Star Citizen development. It will be a 64 bit game being created for next-gen systems. It will have extremely high poly counts with super realistic physics and shaders coming out the airlocks. There is already a downloadable, small demonstration of the engine called "The Hangar Module", but I think you have to be a contributor to get it.

      Trust me, Crysis is dead. The next big question will be, "Does it run SC?"

    5. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by abies · · Score: 2

      I'm really unimpressed with the demo so far. Don't see any real difference to Eve Online hangar rendering for example. Plus, rendering spaceships is probably easiest thing you can aim for - compared to trees/foliage, water, mossy rocks, realistic sky etc.
      If SC will require top-end hardware it will be only because they are lazy, not because there are so big requirements to render it nicely. High-poly models doesn't make sense when you end up having 6 polygons for each pixel... and when you can achieve 99% of same effect with some smart bump/displacement/whatever mappings.

    6. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 1

      I didn't check out the Hangar Module myself, my PC is not up to it.
      But the videos they have floating around do look mighty impressive. Look at the massively detailed cockpits and the realistically moving parts on the ships. Obviously, it's still in development, but the features they are promising, like walking around your own spaceship or walking inside a capital ship and being able to look through a window and watch the battle taking place outside, there is nothing like it at the moment.
      And it will take a lot of horsepower. Most games have you either walking around interiors or flying around exteriors. SC intends to have both at the same time. Sounds fantastic to me.

    7. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by fast+turtle · · Score: 1

      Well if it runs Crysis, it certainly handles Supreme Commander (SC) quite well. Get your Abbreviations right before "Opening your mouth and confirming your a fool" as President Lincoln once said.

      --
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    8. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 1

      Back off newbie. SC, as everyone knows, officially stands for "Star Control", since 1990 and exactly up to the point at which Star Citizen is released.

      However, I came to realize that my claim about Crysis being dead is a little ironic, considering that SC is based on CryEngine 4. :D

    9. Re:Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs by aliquis · · Score: 1

      SC is Starcraft.

  3. Looking good so far. by Chas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
    1. Re:Looking good so far. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They've made major improvements recently with regards to performance consistency in their drivers, especially with multi-GPU and multi-monitor setups.

    2. Re:Looking good so far. by Knuckx · · Score: 1

      No one makes decent graphics drivers. Intels drivers have so many strange oddities it's not funny (random garbage textures/shader faults), AMDs are generally naff, nVidias break themselves every so often and need a full reinstall (wiping your configuration out along with it), and Matrox releases updates once every 3 years (if you are lucky).

    3. Re:Looking good so far. by Nemyst · · Score: 1

      Exactly. Most reviews don't really cover long-term usage and that's where AMD has issues. I've gone AMD/ATI since the X series and I'm probably going to move to NVIDIA next time because I've had a lot of driver issues across numerous computers (including laptops). It's quite frustrating too because if their drivers were roughly on par with NVIDIA's, AMD would be crushing the competition.

    4. Re:Looking good so far. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Hey, it's 2013, not 2003. I remember there was a time when ATi drivers were shoddy, but I think that they've long since gotten their act together.

      I haven't tried an AMD card in five years because last time I did, their drivers were shit. Your decade rant is hyperbole.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Looking good so far. by jakobX · · Score: 1

      Never had any problems with AMD drivers and ive used their cards since radeon 8500le. Ive also had Nvidia cards in my machine and also didnt have any major problems.

      Sure sometimes drivers will give you problems but to say that one company has consistently better drivers is nonsense. At the moment i have no problems with my hd7850, hd4870 and even my nvidia ION HTPC system stopped giving me problems after two years of "fun" (HDMI related).

  4. Re:But still sub-par Linux drivers by wjcofkc · · Score: 2

    I completely sympathize. Then again, NVIDIA Linux drivers are far from perfect too. It really is a shame, and I really do feel left out in the cold as a Linux user. I hope all this steam box hype pushes things in the right direction for Linux graphics drivers in general. For the time being, the open source NVIDIA drivers are getting the job done for me - but they are far from perfect. I would use the proprietary drivers, but I have run into to many issues where upgrading the kernel creates kernel\driver combo that freaks out and causes headaches. I want my display driver to work for me, not me for it.

    --
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  5. Re:Not Really? by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    On top of the price rundown.

  6. Re:But still sub-par Linux drivers by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    That's gonna hurt them.

  7. Re:Terrible thermal and noise by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    And you sound like an nDevious fanboy running at 100%.

  8. Re:Timeout Detection and Recovery? by Cammi · · Score: 2

    Exactly this. Since inception till Windows 8.0, they had nothing but CRAP for drivers. I haven't checked out the 8.1 drivers yet.

  9. headline doesn't exactly match summary or article by locopuyo · · Score: 1

    I RTFA and just like the summary the 780 and the 290X are pretty close on everything and both lead on different games.
    One thing that was disappointing about the article is the SLI/crossfire benchmarks. They only compared a couple games that no one plays and only compared it against the 780 in SLI instead of the Titan which is the real king of SLI. They didn't do any 4k or multidisplay testing.

    --
    The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
  10. the way games were meant to be played by sayfawa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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]

    --
    Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
    1. Re:the way games were meant to be played by mrchew1982 · · Score: 1

      just download the blank .bnk files and overwrite the stupid nvidia video, along with any others!

    2. Re:the way games were meant to be played by Whorhay · · Score: 1

      You don't usually even need to download anything extra. Just move the existing file to a backup directory and put an empty text file in it's place renamed to match.

    3. Re:the way games were meant to be played by readacc · · Score: 1

      What's with all the suggestions in the replies about downloading replacement bink files or replacing them with empty placeholder files? Just delete or name the damn things - most games will simply skip to the next video file, or in the absence of them all, go straight to the menu.

      For me though, I try to avoid doing this and if there's a way to skip via the config file (such as with Dishonored or Rage), then it's preferable.

    4. Re:the way games were meant to be played by sayfawa · · Score: 1

      Thanks, I had no idea this was possible. never really thought about it tbh. bit of a noob, I guess.

      --
      Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
  11. yeah, but is the driver jacked up? by GodfatherofSoul · · Score: 1

    Last January I went with Nvidia because the AMD graphics card was buggy.

    --
    I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
    1. Re:yeah, but is the driver jacked up? by Bigbutt · · Score: 1

      Did the same thing last December.

      [John]

      --
      Shit better not happen!
  12. Re:Not Really? by XaXXon · · Score: 1

    yeah, huh? No.

    And especially not at high resolutions that you'd actually use a card like this for.

    You're not going to run 1080p on something like this. 3x27" is the interesting resolution and it the 290 hauls ass.

  13. Re:But still sub-par Linux drivers by XaXXon · · Score: 1

    Yeah.. they'll sell a few thousand copies less.

    But 2014! That'll be the year of Linux on the desktop!!!

  14. Re:Terrible thermal and noise by XaXXon · · Score: 1

    Why do you care about thermals? I care about framerate, visual quality, and noise.

    The 290 running with a 40% fan is LOADS faster than the 780 -- especially at high resolution.

    Who cares if it could go faster, take it for what it is right now and it's a better card.

    And hell -- if you REALLY care, hook up water cooling to this and watch it really scream!

  15. Re:Not Really? by XaXXon · · Score: 1

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/12

    has the 290 on top of 780 sli -- in SLOW mode.

    3840x2160 is the kind of resolution you want this card for. You don't need it for 1080p, so comparing there is silly.

  16. Re:Terrible thermal and noise by XaXXon · · Score: 1

    I don't know exactly how you define the "thermals" to be "terrible". The card is a beast. Pretend 40% is 100%. It's the best card on the market - price at no object (also it's cheaper than the top 2 nVidia cards). The fact that it can do more if you ask it to should just be a bonus.

  17. The card is good, but the stock cooler sucks by JDG1980 · · Score: 1

    AMD pushed the new Hawaii chip pretty hard to get these results. It will usually bump up against the thermal wall (max 95 degrees C) when gaming at full load, and on 'Uber' mode (there's a switch to choose between that and 'Silent'), it's quite loud. Part of the problem is that AMD is using a mediocre blower-style cooler, which can't run at or near 100% fan speed without putting off an unacceptable level of noise, and can't dissipate enough heat to keep the card from running up against the thermal wall. To compound matters further, the first wave of cards are all made by AMD, so there are no third-party coolers yet (though EK has compatible waterblocks, for people who swing that way).

    If you want to buy a R9 290X, it would probably be a good idea to wait a couple months for AMD to start letting third-party vendors make their own boards. I suspect that the custom coolers from vendors like Asus and MSI will do a lot better than the cheap AMD blower. A non-reference R9 290X has the potential to not only perform better (less or no thermal throttling), but also stay quieter under load.

  18. Re:Timeout Detection and Recovery? by AHuxley · · Score: 2

    Thats why for this generation+ you pay and enjoy your games with NVIDIA. Next generation it might be worth saving some cash again.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  19. I don't buy Nvidia for performance by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    I buy them for stability. I can't be the only one that's had, and continues to have, trouble with ATI's hardware. Maybe it's different in the $200+ range, but I buy in the $90-$130 range... I can't find it now but my bro was telling me that one of the gaming PC manufacturers dropped ATI because of the support calls :(.

    I miss the color quality from my 1650, but I haven't had any luck with their hardware since then...

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    1. Re:I don't buy Nvidia for performance by Massacrifice · · Score: 1

      Funny, last time I bought an Nvidia (a 8600GT with the infamous G86 chip) card it died within months because of internal solder thermal failure.

      --
      -- Home is where you eat your heart out.
    2. Re:I don't buy Nvidia for performance by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

      You're basically stuck buying from Gigabyte or Asus if you buy Nvidia. Everyone else makes junk.

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  20. Cards from duopoly are artificially crippled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It is a grand shame that we, the consumers (professional and casual/gamer) are left with no other choice than that duopoly Nvidia / ATI pair.

    Most of their consumer grade cards are artificially crippled in the attempt to force us to dole out even more of our hard earned cash just to get their GPU to tap to their full potential.

    The GPU market is no longer competitives. The duopoly have slowed the competition to a crawl.

    Every single year they come out of their "new version" of cards which are not that much different from their previous offerings, no matter if it's the number of shaders, or DP performances, or compute units, or geometry processors ...

    1. Re:Cards from duopoly are artificially crippled by TeXMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      Either you're trolling or you have no frigging idea what you're talking about.

      It is true that often the low-end cards are just crippled versions of the high-end cards, something which —as despicable as it might be— is nothing new to the world of technology. But going from this to saying that there is no competition and no (or slow) progress is a step into ignorance (or trolling).

      I've been dealing with GPUs (for the purpose of computing, not gaming) for over five years, that is to say almost since the beginning of proper hardware support for computing on GPU. And there has been a lot of progress, even with the very little competition there has been so far.

      NVIDIA alone has produced three major architectures, with very significant differences between them. If you compare the capabilities of a Tesla (1st gen) with those of a Fermi (2nd gen) or a Kepler (3rd gen), for example, you get: Fermi, has introduced an L2 and an L1 cache, which was not present in the Tesla arch, lifting some of the very strict algorithmic restrictions imposed on memory-bound kernels; it also introduced hardware-level support for DP. Kepler is not as big a change over Tesla, but it has introduced things such as the ability for stream processors to swizzle private variables among them, which is a rather revolutionary idea in the GPGPU paradigm. And 6 times more stream processors per compute unit over the previous generation is not exactly something I'd call "not that much different".

      AMD has only had one major overhaul (the introduction of GCN), instead of two, but I'm not really spending more words on how much of a change it was compared to the previous VLIW architectures they had. It's a completely different beast, with the most important benefit being that its huge computing power can be harnessed much more straightforwardly. And if you ever had to hand-vectorize your code looking for the pre-GCN hotspot of workload per wavefront, you'd know what a PITN that was.

      I would actually hope they stopped coming up with new archs, and spent some more time refining their software side. AMD has some of the worst drivers ever seen by a major hardware manufacturer (in fact, considering they've consistently had better, cheaper hardware, there isn't really any other explanation for their inability to gain dominance in the GPU market), but NVIDIA isn't exactly problem free: their support for OpenCL, for example, is ancient and crappy (obviously, since they'd rather have people use CUDA to do compute on their GPUs).

      And hardware-wise, Intel is finally stepping up their game. With their HD4000 chipset they've finally managed to produce an IGP with decent performance (it even supports compute), although AMD's APUs are still top dog. On the HPC side, their Xeon Phi offerings are very interesting competitors to the NVIDIA Tesla (not the arch, the brand name for the HPC-dedicated devices) cards.

      --
      "I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
    2. Re:Cards from duopoly are artificially crippled by fast+turtle · · Score: 1

      I would actually hope they stopped coming up with new archs, and spent some more time refining their software side. AMD has some of the worst drivers ever seen by a major hardware manufacturer (in fact, considering they've consistently had better, cheaper hardware, there isn't really any other explanation for their inability to gain dominance in the GPU market), but NVIDIA isn't exactly problem free: their support for OpenCL, for example, is ancient and crappy (obviously, since they'd rather have people use CUDA to do compute on their GPUs).

      What I'd like to see both Nvidia and AMD do is take the damn time to really optimze the hell out of their chips, dropping power demand while improving performance. In regards to the drivers and software side of the damn things, yea, I'd love to see a driver only offering again. It doesn't have to be the fucking fastest, just give me stability. I want the rock solid drivers that used to be the case and forget about all the extra shit that's included with CCC or the NVCPL.

      --
      Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
  21. Faster than GTX 780 by harshal.tawade · · Score: 1

    It's a great news that finally AMD got faster than NVIDIA and that too with $100 less. Good work AMD, but just waiting to see how long they remain faster than NVIDIA. Hope this time their hardware run for longer peroid too.

  22. Re:Timeout Detection and Recovery? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ...if you could reinstall, you didn't brick your machine.

  23. Nethack doesn't have this problem by billstewart · · Score: 1, Insightful

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

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  24. Re:Driver openness by Xtifr · · Score: 3, Informative

    ATI Linux drivers have traditionally been crappy, but since they were bought by AMD, they've opened up a lot, and have been steadily contributing to the main kernel. The kernel drivers (as opposed to the proprietary Linux drivers) have been improving by leaps and bounds lately. Kernel 3.5 saw 3D performance improvements of over 35% with some AMD cards, and 3.12 is supposed to have a similar huge boost.

    I don't know how they compare to the closed source drivers from Nvidia *or* ATI, but I'm currently running 3.10, and the in-kernel drivers are definitely working very well for me.

    Phoronix on 3.5 drivers

    Phoronix on 3.12 drivers.

  25. Great by Orphis · · Score: 1

    Now we have a new AMD card that can generate more OpenGL errors per second!

    Seriously, working with AMD is hard. Their OpenGL implementation never works properly and we always need workarounds to get the job done.
    NVidia on the other hand has always been working better for me as a developer.

  26. 7XXX series is much better now by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2

    I can't speak for the 2XX series, but the 7XXX series I went for, swapped out and swapped back in again is now much better than it was in January. I purchased it, found out it wasn't stable and wouldn't drive two dual link DVI screens, put an old NVidia 8600GT in and felt frustrated for a few months. Then I bought a displayport-DVI adapter that had dual link capability and put the 7XXX back in. It was two major releases further in driver version and the stability problems I had running Linux were gone. I'm sure some people will disagree with me because the bugs they encounter are still not fixed, but the ones I was having seem to be gone now.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
  27. Re:Not Really? by 0111+1110 · · Score: 1

    You're not going to run 1080p on something like this.

    That's very true. If I buy this I'll be running it with a 1600x1200 20" monitor.

    --
    Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
  28. good for water cooled systems by 0111+1110 · · Score: 1

    This will be a good deal when prices drop below the MSRP of $549 if you are going to water cool it. It still uses 50%+ more power at idle and quite a bit more power when gaming though. It also runs hotter and will stress a water cooling system that much more, especially in crossfire mode. Nevertheless it seems like a good card for a water cooling setup.

    What bothers me is that you pretty much *have to* water cool it if you don't want it to sound like a vaccuum cleaner. The Nvidia cards are usable with stock air cooling or water cooling.

    Keep in mind that a water block for the 290x

    will set you back around 100 euros or $140. So that brings the price from $549 to $689 or about $40 *more* than the GTX780. Of course for $40 more you get a card that is somewhat faster than the 780 at least at stock clocks.

    --
    Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
  29. Re:Driver openness by gsnedders · · Score: 1

    Power management is one of the big things that's been worked on in the 3.11/3.12 timeframe, FWIW. It'd be lovely to get some hard data on how big the difference is once 3.12 is out.

  30. Stability Performance by danknight48 · · Score: 1

    Cant seem to find the original nvidia vs ati render stuttering, but these will do.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6857/amd-stuttering-issues-driver-roadmap-fraps
    http://techreport.com/review/24022/does-the-radeon-hd-7950-stumble-in-windows-8/10

    I couldn't care less if this this the cheapest/fastest card on the planet.
    Until AMD fix the core stuttering issues with their drivers, instead of just patching it for a AAA game now and then. I'am really not interested.

    Frame rate isnt everything, stability and consistent render times of those frames are. Yes, i have an ATI card and i'am regretting it.

  31. Re:Not Really? by Cederic · · Score: 1

    Given I have games that can drop below 60fps on a gtx780 at 2560x1440 I dread to imagine trying to push three times that resolution through.

    Frankly $100 isn't a massive difference (relative to the other $3k my PC cost) and I prefer Nvidia for the driver support so I wouldn't have gone with the ATI card even if it had been available when I purchased, but I'm glad that ATI are still progressing and preventing Nvidia from stagnating too.

  32. Re:Terrible thermal and noise by Cederic · · Score: 1

    Why do you care about thermals? I care about framerate, visual quality, and noise.

    I care about thermals because they directly influence noise and also because I have a lovely warm house and don't want my computer to catch fire.

    My computer causes almost the same noise as my TV while I'm gaming. It can only do that because the fans aren't working very hard, which is because.. well, thermals matter.

  33. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  34. Re:Timeout Detection and Recovery? by Rockoon · · Score: 1

    Indeed. I was always an NVidia fanboy when it came to GPU's once I upgraded off of Voodoo3, starting with a GeForce 4 Ti 4800 up until the 8800 GT which I used until just a month ago. Towards the end the drivers started to become real crap, running the 8800 GT hotter and hotter (downgrading the drivers showed this to be true) and there were reports of the latest drivers killing cards on a large scale, not to mention the widespread growing TDR issues with certain games (that go unfixed for literally years.. epic multi-hundred page threads on the steam forums.)

    I am now the happy owner of an A10-6800K just using the integrated HD 8670D (which is a bit better than that 8800GT.) So far I havent experienced the "ATI/AMD driver issues" that I was worried about. It seems to do fine at 1080p gaming so long anti-aliasing is disabled (16x anisotropic filtering has no meaningful performance impact.) My favorite game is Team Fortress 2 and this thing rocks out 100+ FPS at 1920x1080 with high settings (but no AA.)

    Eventually I'll want a discrete GPU and right now NVidia isnt an acceptable option for me due to the issues they have been having and that I experienced first hand. They completely lost me when one of their employees posted to one of those epic threads on the steam forums saying that he found the problem that caused the TDR issue in TF2 on 8xxx/9xxx series cards and it will be fixed in the next driver release.. and then he went silent for 2 months only to come back and say nah... actually havent found the problem and wont be looking. So fuck nvidia.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  35. Re:Stability Performance by JDG1980 · · Score: 1

    You're quoting reviews that are months old. The newer driver updates were designed specifically to fix these problems, and for the most part, they have succeeded. (There are still issues in some specific CrossFire and/or multi-monitor configurations, but these won't affect most users.)

    One of the reviews you cited was from The Tech Report, which did a good job of documenting these frame pacing issues with hard numbers a couple of months back. Well, let's see what they have to say about the R9 290X now:

    You can see from the raw plots that the 290X looks good, with more frames produced and generally lower frame rendering times than anything else we tested. Every card encounters a few slowdowns, and the spikes on the 290X aren't anything exceptional.

    Our "badness" index concentrates on those frames that take a long time to produce. For the first two thresholds of 50 and 33 ms, the results are pretty similar among the newer GPUs, which again suggests a CPU bottleneck or the like. However, for slinging out frames 60 times per second, once every 16.7 milliseconds, the R9 290X is easily the best choice.

  36. Re:But still sub-par Linux drivers by armanox · · Score: 1

    You assume he's running Ubuntu. Ubuntu != Linux (And /. still doesn't support Unicode)

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  37. Re:But still sub-par Linux drivers by armanox · · Score: 1

    Au contraire, they work quite well once you install them. I have OpenCL running on both a HD 5770 and a 7750.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  38. Re:OK but my Matrox is dual head by armanox · · Score: 1

    Ummm...I wasn't aware there was an issue with multi-display at 70Hz. My Geforce 3 could drive 1 monitor at 150Hz (1024x768), I would think a modern card could do that on two...

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.