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

Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs

[Suiggy]

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.

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.

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

[etherelithic]

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.