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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.
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. Sites that follow Nvidia's guidelines, and use Nvidia's specific language to denigrate the new AMD GPUs receive very handsome payments.
AMD's new Hawaii/290 chip is MUCH smaller than the Nvidia part it thrashes at enthusiasts' resolutions (only a fool would use these cards for 1080P or less). The consequence of going for a smaller die with a larger memory bus is that AMD's part consumes more power than the 'Titan' equivalent from Nvidia, an issue that enthusiasts absolutely do NOT care about (and when running in 'idle'- eg., doing desktop stuff, even these high-end cards from Nvidia and AMD use only very modest amounts of power).
AMD can, and will sell its 290 at much lower prices than Nvidia. This, despite the fact that only AMD has the trueaudio sound acceleration DSP block, and only AMD supports the new Mantle API that exactly apes the low level 'to-the-metal' coding possible on the new consoles from Sony and MS (both of which exclusively use AMD tech for their CPU and GPU functions).
Nvidia is in maximum FUD mode, devoting tens of millions of its PR budget to paying shills to bad-mouth AMD. In truth, until Nvidia can launch new parts based on a process shrink to 20nm late next year, Nvidia really has no option but to rely on disinformation.
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. Nvidia's high mid-end cards (the 770/680 and below) only come with a NONE future-proof 2GB, unless you invest in a mega expensive 4GB version of the 770. AMD, on the other hand, has been selling high mid-end FUTURE-PROOF cards with 3GB at a reasonable price for years now, the 3GB 7950/7970 (and now the 3GB 280x). AMD's 7950 is less than HALF the cost of Nvidia's 4GB 770. Nvidia simply does not sell affordable 3GB+ cards.
Nvidia is fully aware that 2GB will be completely inadequate for games released at the end of 2014, but considers this "built-in-obsolescence", forcing their foolish fan-boys to have to upgrade more often than they may otherwise wish. However, there is ZERO chance of Nvidia selling any card with 3GB+ at a reasonable cost in the foreseeable future.
BTW when your graphics card has too little memory, it doesn't cease working, but unless you lower the quality settings, running out of local RAM tends to HALVE the framerate. You can see this effect in benchmarks showing the performance of roughly equivalent cards- say the 1GB 6870 vs 2GB 7790 (260x) at 1080P. Next year 3GB AMD cards will be getting vastly higher framerates than 2GB Nvidia cards with otherwise similar GPU power. And this will be BEFORE the advantages of a 'Mantle' version' are taken into account.
Current Nvidia products have never been less future proof, and Nvidia has an uphill battle to reverse this fact next year.