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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."
That should have been the real headline.
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.
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!!!
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.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
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!
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"
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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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)
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.
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?