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AMD's Radeon R9 290X Review

Posted by samzenpus on from the how-does-it-stack-up? dept.

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"

6 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. ATI drivers by CockMonster · · Score: 5, Informative

    I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver. .Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.

    1. Re:ATI drivers by stox · · Score: 5, Informative

      148MB for the latest Nvidia driver.

      --
      "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
    2. Re:ATI drivers by bored · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Its more than that by the time the package decompresses.

      Just some data points from a single machine.

      C:\NVIDIA folder
      V197 (~2010) 85M
      V320 (~2013) 182M

      The vast majority of it appears to be the control panel, and the physx package.

      The display driver is just a few megs by comparison. If you skim off the hd audio/nv stereo/cuda/opencl/GL libraries you probably could get the whole shebang in under 10MB, and you could still play directX games.

      I've been killing the nview and services for years. Never had a problem with the machine, but it always bothers me that they have a bunch of crap running that doesn't actually appear to do anything.

      After all the once or twice a year I actually manipulate my monitor settings I am fully capable of finding my way into the windows display control panel and adjusting things there of opening the control panel from the actual control panel.

      Its quite possible I'm not getting the absolute best performance playing games, but frankly I would much rather adjust settings from within the games than have nvidia overriding the game settings.

    3. Re: ATI drivers by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When Windows breaks, it's because I installed an update that went horribly wrong.

      When Linux breaks, it's because I installed an update that went horribly wrong.

  2. AMD - Can't help but be a fan.. by brxndxn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
  3. Re:Maybe I'm just a lame "PC gamer"... by pspahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.