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AMD's Radeon R9 290X Review
Billly Gates writes "AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is doing well. AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1,000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target"
I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver. .Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.
After seeing AMD bet the farm on Athlon and beat a company with 10x the r&d budget, I cannot help but be a fan. The biggest reason for AMD being behind in CPUs today is lack of r&d budget based on unfair duopoly competition from Intel during the years where AMD was superior. Hopefully, AMD can make up for this missing r&d money by being superior with graphics for a while.
I do not believe there is a tech company pushing more innovation with less resources..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
We've also come to learn that AMD changed the double-precision rate from 1/4 to 1/8 on the R9 290X, yielding a maximum .7 TFLOPS. The FirePro version of this configuration will support full-speed (1/2 rate) DP compute, giving professional users an incentive to spring for Hawaii's professional implementation.
Lots of folks use ggpu but don't have a "professional" budget to pay the extortion fee to have artificial limits lifted from the hardware they purchase.
The drivers do NOT need .Net, or 90Mb. The extremely crappy control panel, which has NOTHING to do with the drivers, uses the dreadful .Net API, and thusly needs loads of HDD space. People in-the-know install third-party front-ends like 'Tray Tools' or the like.
Sadly, ATI loves to take significant pay-offs from companies like MS, acting if THEY are the customer, not the person who purchased the graphics card. This, we can truly describe as ATI/AMD endlessly shooting themselves in the foot. Using .Net for the official control panel was a disgusting and despicable act, and was a great example of the contempt the older version of ATI had for its users.
AMD/ATI is a much better company today- it was either improve or die, and after the longest possible time, AMD finally made the right choice. However, we get glimpses of the bad old ATI with issues like the fiasco over the recent release of 'new' GPU cards that are almost all just re-brands of older cards, with the free games removed (AND higher prices). This kick-in-the-teeth for customers was done simply so AMD can make a song and dance about free games with all their cards AFTER they finish releasing the new 290 family (the 290X is just the first of three 290 cards- the 'free' games won't be announced until after AMD launches all of them).
In truth, ATI/AMD customers need to be smarter than customers of Nvidia products. Nvidia prides itself on cards that 'just work'. With AMD, you frequently need to know what you are doing, at which point AMD rivals Nvidia- but 'out of the box' the AMD experience is usually worse. Nvidia supports its older graphics cards MUCH better than AMD, but older graphics cards from AMD tend to get faster with time as newer games exploit the more forward looking architecture of ATI designs.
People have more problems with ATI cards in games, but this happens because uncommon settings in ATI's control panel (like the number of frames being rendered ahead) can cause terrible game problems if not adjusted per game on the desktop. Again, informed ATI owners KNOW which settings to tweak, but for the average user, the ATI experience can be frustrating. This is entirely ATI's fault, because a PC game, with a tiny amount of code, can programmatically set the correct options, but many game developers do not know how to do this. Nvidia does a much better job helping developers set-up their game code correctly for all usable generations of Nvidia graphics cards.
ATI has a nasty habit, as well, of disowning very recent cards that, on paper, had the features to support current games. ATI likes its shills to say ('jeez, your 4 year old card is out-of-date junk') whereas Nvidia happily ensures every generation of its cards that support DX9 work as well as their hardware allows. In reality, ATI cards from the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series are effectively the same as everything up to the 6000 series (excluding the orphan architecture of the 6900 VLIW4 oddities). However, ATI pays technical sites to state the cards from the 5000 series and earlier are obsolete (technically this is completely untrue). In contrast, Nvidia is proud to support cards from the 8000 series and onwards, which is a similar timeframe to the 2000 series from ATI.
While it is true that 'cheap' current gen cards destroy premium cards from that far back, it is the principle that matters.
...but "for as little as $550 each" just blows my mind.
I thought I was crazy when I spent $400 on a graphics card once, but I (and I understand it's subjective) was perfectly happy with the performance on any game I played for the next 2 years. $500-$1000 (x2) Crossfire/SLI setups just seem to me to be about people with too much money and not enough creativity as to how to spend it...
"only" 550 dollars. Most people spend less than that on a whole computer, or don't HAVE 550 dollars.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
R9 290X also has double point precision for about half the price.
The R9 290X is a direct Titan competitior.
Has anyone else noticed that despite the endless 4K resolution marketing being put out there by AMD, there is not a peep on the specific type of HDMI port the card has?
There is a HUGE difference between HDMI 2.0 and 1.4, but it's always specified as just "HDMI" with no version number. No review mentions the HDMI version, even though one would think that a real journalist would put in some effort to research this and find out.
I suppose it's easier to run the card through a bunch of automated benchmarks, cut & paste 15 pages of results to maximise ad impressions, and call it a "review".
I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver. .Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.
You didn't download a 90MB driver. You downloaded a 90MB package which includes all drivers for all versions of windows, for all architectures, for all ATI cards, and it came with a utility that automatically installs the correct thing for your situation.
I wish more companies did this. Take the guess work out of the download screen. NVIDIA does it too.
Also what's wrong with .NET 4.5? Do you regularly judge applications solely by the framework their developers chose?
I've always had the notion that if you just wait a year, you can get yesterday's models for a great price and instead play the games that now have been out long enough to be properly patched. This has the bonus effect of weeding out a lot of crap games.
Which of course comes with some downsides.