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AMD's Radeon R9 290 Delivers 290X Performance For $150 Less
crookedvulture writes "The back and forth battle for PC graphics supremacy is quite a thing to behold. Last week, Nvidia cut GeForce prices in response to the arrival of AMD's latest Radeons. That move caused AMD to rejigger its plans for the new Radeon R9 290, which debuted today with a higher default fan speed and faster performance than originally planned. This $400 card offers almost identical performance to AMD's flagship R9 290X for $150 less. Indeed, it's often faster than Nvidia's $1000 GeForce Titan. But the 290 also consumes a lot more power, and its fan spins up to 49 decibels under load. Fortunately, the acoustic profile isn't too grating. Radeon R9 290 isn't the only new graphics card due this week, either. Nvidia is scheduled to unveil its GeForce GTX 780 Ti on November 7, and that card could further upset the balance at the high end of the GPU market. As AMD and Nvidia trade blows, PC gamers seem to be the ones who benefit."
Additional reviews available from AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware.
I read the headline as a this new card delivering 290 times the performance of something else.
Trolling is a art,
They used a shitty case with absolutely horrible acoustic profile to measure the card noise and got a whopping 57 dB.
Had they bothered to use a real case, they'd have had it almost half as loud (looks like everyone else managed to stay under 50 dB.)
It's like Anandtech never heard of Delta Fans, either.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Who are the jackasses in charge of marketing at these companies?
The numbers AMD are flinging around as product names are bloody confusing, and I used to build computers for a living (though, admittedly, that was back during the pre-Intel "Core" days where anyone knew that a Pentium 4 was better then a Pentium 3). They look like revisions for the silicon design or something, and the "X" at the end isn't helping either (makes me think it's a multiplier or something). It all kind of reminds me of how AMD used to name their CPUs, and used some bullshit number they pulled out of their asses rather then an actual megahertz rating like everyone else.
It amazes me that people can't figure out a basic, simple, and scalable numbering scheme to make it obvious that something is newer then something else and more or less powerful at the same time (because not everything new is better). I would think this would be a priority so people can figure out what the fuck they want to buy, but then again, maybe that's the point- confuse the customer so much they land up purchasing what you want them to buy, rather then what they actually need.
seriously, it could only have been worse if there was "ON SALE NOW!" in the summary. then again, there is "Nvidia cut GeForce prices" so meh.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The real story is a $400 AMD card can perform as well as or better than a $1000 Nvidia one....
As AMD and Nvidia trade blows, PC gamers seem to be the ones who benefit
TFA claimed that PC gamers would be benefiting from the "trade blows" between AMD and Nvidia.
But are they ?
Back in the days when the marketplace was served by a lot more vendors, PC Gamers back then were truly benefiting from the fierce competition.
Sadly, it is not happening anymore.
From a marketplace that used to be served by 6 competing vendors into a duopoly marketplace that is currently served by only 2 vendors --- the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl.
The performance increment for every new edition of hardware is getting smaller and smaller.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Who the hell spends $400+ on a video card anymore? How many games will come out in the next year that will get any benefit from any card over $200? 2? maybe 3? And don't forget, a year from now the $200 mid range cards will out perform this card anyway.
Who wants to spend 400 on a card that doesn't even support Double Precision floating point at 1/4 of it's SP processing capability?
Seriously, my 4 year old HD4770 STILL has better DP fp ratings than the majority of the current released cards up to like a 250 dollar pricepoint (msrp).
Astroturf much?
Just out of interest, since I could with a bit of free cash, how much is AMD paying for shilling these days?
The HAF 922 has huge open mesh panels. Not the same sort of thing as the R4 at all. Perhaps you meant a different box.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/amd-stomps-nvidia-with-r9-290-at-least-in-reviews/
If you read the comments it looks like that, by default, Catalyst is set to spin the fans too slowly.
Sign me up!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Stop it! We have too many PC graphic cards already. How will the developers cope with all the different hardware?!
Nvidia does more shilling on Slashdot than most any hardware company that exist .
Not really. Running harder to reach similar performance as a higher level card with high energy consumption, lots of noise and a GTX 780ti coming soon.
May sell to some, not to others.
Considering how shitty nvidia drivers have been since ~292.xx? They'd have to pay me to buy one of their cards at this point, seems that they've done a great flip as has happened in the past, and they outsourced their driver development to 3 cats and a dog.
Om, nomnomnom...
It gets WORSE. Now the new consoles are here, each with 8GB of memory, the average amount of GPU memory needed for 1080P or above is about to rise above 2GB for the first time.
Erm... this doesn't even make sense. At all. Are you claiming that to display 1080P you need a graphics card with 2GB onboard? Are you claiming that the new consoles have 8GB GPU RAM? What?
Besides, the amount of onboard RAM has long been an utterly useless metric for determining graphics performance. Since RAM is so cheap, nVidia and ATI often just drop lots on a crappy architecture, and advertise the RAM.
I can get a lot more megahashes/second on ASIC hardware for the same money.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
my 22" monitor's picture doesn't get better after 1080p. Heck, a 40" tv doesn't... 4k is a novelty for anyone with less than a 70" except maybe die hard flight sim and racing fans.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
i don't mean to nitpick but "Last week, Nvidia cut GeForce prices..." should read: "Last week, Nvidia cut GeForce prices for GTX 770, 780." I checked the price of an NVidia Geforce 650 but the price was the same.
Better headline: AMD's Radeon R9 290 Slashvertised
I thought IT people like gadgets and cool consumer hardware?
Funnily enough, consumer hardware is made by companies that sell it for money, we don't have a solution to 'fix' that yet.
I was always (post 3DFX) an NVidia GPU user until this year, and it was the drivers and their negative effects that prevented me from choosing NVidia this time around.
It wasnt always that way. For the most part you could just use the latest drivers and everything would be OK, but about 2 years ago I started having issues where a game wouldnt work with one driver while another game wouldnt work with the ones that would work with... which bothered me but didnt push me over the edge. Then the reports in June of the newest drivers killing cards, and rendering horrible artifacts in many games...
Its a shame, because I was really eyeballing that vanilla GTX 650 that runs on 64 watts...
In the intrim I picked up an A10-6800K with its integrated HD 8670D which I am extremely impressed with (low expectations shattered), and now I am eyeballing the HD 7790 that runs on 85 watts.
"His name was James Damore."
Considering how shitty nvidia drivers have been since ~292.xx? They'd have to pay me to buy one of their cards at this point, seems that they've done a great flip as has happened in the past, and they outsourced their driver development to 3 cats and a dog.
As a user of AMD cards, I can assure that the AMD drivers still suck as well.
Newest bug: Starting a fullscreen game on a dual monitor system causes the second monitor to black out. Not turn off, mind you, just go 100% black whilst still being powered on. This did not happen on 13.4 but they broke it somehow in 13.9, it's like they spend all their time somehow managing to find ways to progressively make the drivers worse over time[*]. Either that, or the things are horrid messes of spooky-action-at-a-distance spaghetti code... probably the latter.
Oh, also random mouse cursor corruption. The arrow cursor mutates into a white dotted vertical bar until you refresh it.
[*] Only bright side seems to be that they finally fixed the frame-rate drop bug on the Windows desktop with Aero. I'm not 100% sure on this though, I'll have to see if it starts happening again. (This bug has existed for at least 2 years at this point)
http://chosim.com.vn/ http://simmayman.net/
400 W, competes in noise with vacuum cleaners, costs a lot.
Why does no one do a process shrink on last generation's chips and put them out as low noise, low power "good enough" options?
After you have tried a 4k monitor, get Bach to me and this thread.
Obligatory notification: ATI's Linux drivers are pathetic.
Greekgeek
It wasnt always that way. For the most part you could just use the latest drivers and everything would be OK, but about 2 years ago I started having issues where a game wouldnt work with one driver while another game wouldnt work with the ones that would work with...
Maybe YOU haven't been having these problems, but these problems have literally been a part of the nVidia world since the geforce, if not earlier.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're spending how much video hardware and you're still running air cooling?
Put in a good water loop already, sheesh... :-/
My
I mean, there are no roads where you can safely and legally drive it at its top speed, so you may as well get a Mazda MX-5. Similarly; every single time there is a new graphics card out, the Slashdot response is the same. "Who needs this? There is minimal difference between this and this! Are there any games taking advantage of this?"
If you have the money and your an avid gamer, why not? If you can afford to spend $500 on a graphics card every year, I'm sure you also have a top notch monitor with a massive resolution. Also, I'm sure there is always another setting you can switch on in Crysis N. Most of the people who buy these cards aren't suckers. They know a card won't provide them with 3x as much enjoyment even though it costs 3x as much. They simply can afford to stay above the affordability sweetspot.
They also pave the way for the rest of us and ensure that there will be a card next year which does the same for half the price.
I can't help but think this reaction is mostly about penis^H^H^H^H^Hgraphics card envy.
That's why their review ends advising people not to buy the R9 290?
Not sure they understand the terms of their pay off!
You must have read the fucking summary, cheater.
May sell to some, not to others.
I built a quiet gamer for the kid after years of wind tunnel simulators, spent quite a bit extra on that silence, too.
The extra I spent would buy one of these things actually. The point I was getting to is, that I recently realised that the gunfire and explosions pretty well drown out most other noises in the region and we could have stepped up to a faster card anyway.
It'll make a nice Home Theater when we move on.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The point I was getting to is, that I recently realised that the gunfire and explosions pretty well drown out most other noises in the region
That's what headphones are for. Seriously, even if noise wasn't an issue, I used to notice that headphones actually made me a better player in online games, because I could more accurately judge where an enemy was just from the sound alone. So, unless you've got a perfectly positioned surround sound setup hooked up to the PC, headphones are probably best for everyone.
which is totally what she said
As opposed to AMD's drivers working flawlessly?
It's a GPU issue, I don't think any particular brand is doing better than the other.
I have a 560Ti. That was future-proof when I bought it. Now, it's the future, and I'm immune to it. I get good framerates in Minecraft and TF2. Explain how these graphically now-primitive games are going to tax my 560Ti, much less a newer, whiz-bang-ier card? Oh, I know! Minecraft mods! That'll do it! Except FTB, which is a monster of a mod-pack doesn't even scratch the FPS. It lingers in the 200-300 range, even with all the lag-inducing stuff in those mods.
I also play Terraria, Towns, and an occasional game of solitaire. Gone are the days when there were good, new shooters that required a hot new video card. Wake me when the next UT game comes out for the PC. I'll be well-rested. And my 560Ti is future-proof until then.
Nvidia needs a year? Let them take two. I have time. And a future-proof card they sold me years ago, which is "good enough".
I'll see your astroturf, and I'll raise you an unhealthy dose of apathy.
As opposed to AMD's drivers working flawlessly?
Oh no. I have been having problems with their video drivers since long before ATI even had a 3d accelerator.
It's a GPU issue, I don't think any particular brand is doing better than the other.
So far, I'll still have to side with nVidia. Their drivers mostly work, while ATI's drivers mostly fail. For me. Perhaps if people run different software, their experiences are reversed. But the nVidia driver version issue has long been an issue, with some problems only appearing for some titles in later drivers as the way old functions work are diddled to work with new software. Perhaps each and every one of these cases are justified bug fixes, but they still cause the aforementioned problem...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was looking at lower end cards to get a 3 year old desktop with integrated AMD graphics to last another year, but run Star Citizen. Tower had a 300 watt power supply and I was looking at having to replace both the power supply and get a video card at around $150. Or about 1/10th of what I'm planning to spend next year when it will be time to upgrade PC's anyway.
Well ended up getting the R7 240 which runs on 30 watts. I know it's about the equivalent of a 6670, but it will run Star Citizen on Low/Medium settings at least and no need to up grade the PSU and the card was about $80.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Get the kids hooked on the meth and the crack cocaine, 'cause once they're hooked on that, you know what's next: marijuana. Then jazz music. Forget about it. - Brent Butt
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Nvidia has been holding VERY profitable meetings with every possible technical site, explaining in detail just how they should trash the new AMD cards in their forthcoming reviews.
It's not uncommon for competitors to run "debunking" presentations for their partners and vendors in anticipation of their competition's releases.
More Twoson than Cupertino
True about the hearing other players, (or so I've heard), but the cheap-ass $100 headphones have never lasted. I got an extra little baby Mackie and a Rode* condenser mic but still haven't scored the good quality headphones for that upgrade. (Got any brand recommendations for that?) I think the kid likes to rumble the neighborhood anyway.
Hmmm... 5.1 eh?
*I can't render that letter, do I spell it Rude?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for some years ago. Lots of people, including IT professionals, claim that (CPUs or GPUs) have gotten "fast enough" and there is no need for better ones in the future. How can educated intelligent people be so short-sighted?
Anybody who has ever written even the simplest performance-sensitive program should understand that there is not and never will be "enough" processing power.
It is always easy to find more useful things to do if you only had more power. On the other side of the coin, it is always easy to make a program that takes a long time to run, simply by giving it a lot of data to crunch.
Since this is a graphics thread, lets talk about graphics. Obviously the current generation of games works ok on the current generation of hardware. The games were built for that hardware! Even once we have enough pixels, why is everyone so obsessed with counting the number of pixels anyway? How about more complex/realistic graphics using simple algorithms? It is very easy to write a raytracer that handles complex geometry with lights, shadows, and textures. You can even get full-on global illumination, including depth of field, soft shadows, diffuse interreflection, and caustics, pretty easily if you don't mind tracing a thousand rays per pixel. Simple and effective but very slow brute-force solutions have been around a long time, and if we had really really fast GPUs, any college undergrad taking graphics 101 could make breathtakingingly realistic real-time 3D renderers.
Now, you might argue that it is stupid to use brute-force solutions and waste massive amounts of CPU time, just because we can. Well, sometimes it is ok to waste the CPU, if you have tons and tons of CPU time to spare. On the other hand, you can always use more efficient algorithms, with the cost of more complicated code. Then our super-fast hardware would mean you get INSANELY high graphics quality and performance compared to the brute-force solution. Everybody wins.
I'm a graphics guy so this is the kind of thing I'm familiar with. But surely there are examples in other areas of computing where we have many orders of magnitude to go before we run out of ideas for how to use our computing cycles.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Ambient heat makes a bigger difference, as the fan will have to work harder, spin faster, louder, to keep up.
Particularly when the mode of cooling is basically shoving as much ambient air at the problem to solve it.
You can try to correct for it, however then you assume the cooling curve is consistent, which it isn't.
I don't think price is necessarily anything to go by when it comes to headset quality, and I can't recommend any as I've not bought any for years sorry. Just check plenty of Amazon reviews and you should get a good idea of build quality, etc
which is totally what she said
(there is a lot to be said for a good bassy rumble though :D )
which is totally what she said
Yeah, I'm gonna get some regular studio-grade or audiophile-type, but I haven't shopped for those since 1978. I''ll be fooled by a reasonable facsimile of durablity, reckon they'll pack that with viable transducers. I don't even know who the manufacturers are these days.
The hoboroadie buys one piece at a time, so it takes a while to integrate.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I know that Sennheiser make good headphones, though avoid the ones with carbon fibre headbands. Mine cracked after a few months of popping them on and off my head. I then used a metal/leather headband from a cheaper Sennheiser set that my flatmate wasn't using, and it was comfortable. The transducers were great though, and you could replace the cabling very easily if needed, so I think a pair with a good headband would last you a long time.
which is totally what she said
the metal/leather, cheaper set sounds good for me. I've used their microphones, pretty much the high end of my personal experience. Thanks. (replaceble cables are at the top of my specifications.)
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.