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.

Comments

290X

[grub]

I read the headline as a this new card delivering 290 times the performance of something else.

Anandtech Fucked Up

[Khyber]

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.

Re:Anandtech Fucked Up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably more to do with taking measurements at a 12 inch distance rather than something reasonable or even standard like 3 feet. While they're not perfect, I find that that techpower up has the best measurements regarding noise and the largest sample size of different cards.

Re:Anandtech Fucked Up

[GeorgieBoy]

If they tested all the cards in the same case, then they did nothing wrong in their testing. Maybe it wouldn't be 57dB for the 290 in another PC case, but it would be lower for all the other cards too. Perhaps it wouldn't necessarily be a linear drop across all the cards, but you can't simply say their choice of case invalidates their findings that this card is REALLY loud compared to other cards. Plenty of people will own cases with "horrible acoustic profile[s]".

Re:Anandtech Fucked Up

[aliquis]

Then again they are measuring the noise of the graphics card, not the noise dampening of a case.

They could measure it with no case at all..

Re:Anandtech Fucked Up

[adolf]

Noise measurements (all noise measurements, not just those related to PC hardware) are always suspect:

What is the ambient noise level?

What is the test environment? (Is it a well-isolated anechoic chamber, a common desk with a computer near the corner of the room, or is it on the deck of a boat, or on the back of a llama? It makes a huge difference.)

What is the distance between the rig under test and the measurement rig with the microphone?

Is this test rig calibrated? (To what standard?)

What are the properties of the noise? (if it is 57dBa at only 1.5kHz, it is very annoying to me. If it's 57dBa only at 25kHz, it is annoying only to my dog.)

Is the noise different in differing directions?

How do you know?

Did you measure it?

It's all important, lest the resultant number be absolutely unimportant.

Also: Meh. "This blue car sounds better than that other blue car!" is roughly as accurate as a non-descrip "noise measurement" of computer hardware.

Better headline: AMD's Radeon R9 290 Slashvertised

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia

[Lawmeister]

The real story is a $400 AMD card can perform as well as or better than a $1000 Nvidia one....

Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia

[Nemyst]

I was modded down the last time I talked about this, so let me be even clearer: if you buy a Titan for gaming, you're either stupid or have a lot of money to waste. The sole reason Titan is at the price it is is because it has the full double-precision speed, similar to Quadro cards which retail for many thousands of dollars (well, that and the fact NVIDIA had zero competition at such a high range for the better part of a year). They're effectively semi-pro cards for number crunching. NVIDIA thinks that this is enough to warrant the price and to be honest I'd probably take one over a Quadro (which can run up to something like $5,000!).

But again, for gaming, it's entirely unnecessary. Heck, it's extremely likely that the 780Ti, which should be revealed in a few days, will basically be a Titan with higher clocks, slower double-precision operations (whereas the 780 has a few cores less) and less VRAM.

Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia

[gman003]

The Titan isn't positioned as a high-end gaming card as much as it is a low-end scientific computing card. It's the cheapest GPU that has reasonable double-precision floating-point performance. For whatever reason, most Kepler cards run DP operations at 1/24th the speed of single-precision, but the Titan and most of the Tesla cards are able to do so at 1/3rd the speed. There, the Titan runs thousands less than the similar Tesla cards (the K20 is listed on Newegg for $3500, and the K20X is on Amazon for $7700).

The fact that the Titan also gets some buys from gamers with way too much money is just a side bonus. Even since the 780 came out, it's been extremely wasteful to get a Titan for gaming. And Nvidia's own 780 Ti is likely to out-perform the Titan in games for $300 less. Really, I think the only reason they ever marked it as a gaming card was as a publicity stunt - they held the title of "fastest card ever" for quite a while, and they held it by an impressive lead.

Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia

[Entropius]

This.

Yesterday and today I installed 20 Titans in a compute cluster at work, replacing the crappy GTX480's that crash constantly. The cost of these ($20K) would buy us TWO nodes on the local K20 cluster.

We don't really care that much about the float performance, even; much of our code is memory-bandwidth bound, and much of the rest runs iterative sparse-matrix solvers that can be run in "mixed precision", where you iterate a hundred times in single precision, do one update in double precision, a hundred more in single... So we could use the cheaper gamer cards, but the Titan's a price/performance sweet spot that we can't beat. It's even faster than the K20, and compared to the other gamer cards the 6GB memory gives us a huge amount of flexibility.

um

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:um

[Anrego]

That's kinda how all consumer (and even most non-consumer) stuff works.

You have the enthusiasts who for whatever reason have a stronger interest in the technology and are willing to spend significantly more for slightly better. They fund the R&D until it makes it down to the cheaper mass consumer pricing.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with this. I for one was an early adopter of SSDs. I bought one (then another) when 30G was still a big deal. I knew in a few years you'd get way more capacity for way cheaper.. but I didn't care, it was something I wanted to play around with.

If someone has the money to spend and is going to get enjoyment out of paying $1000 for a card where a $200 or so card would probably do, so what... their money, their hobby.

Re:um

[FlyHelicopters]

People who play at a higher resolution than 1080P. I currently game using three Dell 30" monitors, so I have a total of 12 million pixels to push, which is 50% higher than 4K. I could use a pair of 290X cards in crossfire, once they get after market coolers. Yes, I know I'm not a typical user, but you did ask, "who the hell spends $400+ on a video card". The answer would be me and people like me. Considering that I have $3,000 worth of monitors on my desk, $1,000 for a pair of 290X cards in crossfire is not really all that crazy.

Re:um

[asmkm22]

I do, but it's not as bad as you think. I started buying the $1k cards about 10 years ago, then sell them after a year for roughly $700-800. There always seems to be people looking for "older" cards to SLI their current setup. So although I initially did pay $1k to buy into the game, so to speak, I rarely spend more than $200-300 to upgrade to the latest and greatest at any given time. It's not like I'm dropping $1k a year.

Do I need it? Definitely not, since the popularity of consoles has gimped the advancements in graphics in games. Is it worth the couple-hundred a year to stay on top? It is for me.

Re:um

[BlueBlade]

I think you're underestimating how much GPU power games need these days. I bought a Dell 30" monitor 5 years ago, which I'm still using for gaming. The native resolution is 2560x1600, so not even close to the new 4K ones. At this resolution, my old 3 years old Radeon 5870 was struggling to get smooth framerates for several games. So I bought the new GTX 780 when it came out for $600. The new card is fantastic, I can finally play The Witcher 2 at full resolution with high settings, same with Bioshock Infinite, etc. Keep in mind, the new 4K resolutions will demand even more out of GPUs, so it's not likely that the demand will go down all that much yet.

Sure, if you're a gamer who fires up a 1080p console port once in a while, a cheap GPU will do. If you're an avid gamer who needs more than 1080p, you still need to buy the $400+ cards to keep up.

Re:um

[Mashdar]

The first commercial WQXGA displays were released in 2010, so (barring time travel) I call shenanigans.

And I think you overestimate the dot pitches discernible by the human eye :)
4k is just a hype machine.

Re:um

[DocSavage64109]

I've had my 2560x1600 Dell 3007WFP for at least 4 years. Here's an article comparing it to an Apple 30" screen dated 2007.

Re:um

[BlueBlade]

My monitor is a Dell 3007WFP, which was released in the US in December 2005 (so 8 years ago). It's also far from being the only 30" monitor released at that time with that resolution, although most modern 30 inchers seem to be 16:9 instead of my preferred 16:10.

As for pixels, I can definitely see pixels on mine if I disable AA in games, although I only need 2xAA for it to appear totally smooth. 4K would probably take it close to the point where the pixels aren't visible anymore from 3 feet away even with AA disabled, but I haven't used a 4K monitor yet so I'm not positive. I can absolutely guarantee that anyone would be able to make the difference between my monitor and a 4K one though.

Re:Fucking product numbers, how do they work?

[viperidaenz]

A 1.4GHz P3 is a hell of a lot faster than a 1.4GHz P4.
Sort of how a Pentium M 1.6 is around the same performance as a 2.4GHz P4...

Re:Fucking product numbers, how do they work?

[AK Marc]

If it's factual (clock speed or such) then it isn't as easily trademarked. Intel lost the trademark on 486, didn't they?

Re:Are PC gamers benefiting ?

[gl4ss]

s3? shit cards and everyone who bought them got burned.
powervr? desktop cards were shite and everyone who bought them got burned.
sis? everyone who bought their desktop 3d cards got burnt.
matrox? their 3d gaming stuff was shite.

getting the point? the problem was that all the competiton was even more liars about their cards than the two that remain.

Re:Are PC gamers benefiting ?

[Smauler]

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.

We're most definitely not in a duopoly marketplace at the moment. There are currently only 2 companies offering high performance 3D consumer priced cards, but there are other companies in the graphics business. The most popular graphics card used by people using Steam is the Intel HD Graphics 3000, for example. Matrox is still about, too, but not competing in consumer 3D.

To be honest, I can't really remember a time in which there were more than 3 (possibly 4) major players in the high end consumer 3D market. Matrox dabbled, but never got close to a cost efficient gaming card, really IMO... the closest they came was the G400 IIRC. That was the era when you could possibly claim there were 4 competing vendors. Soon after, Matrox left the market to concentrate on 2D, and 3dfx dissapeared up their own arse. I'm not sure who the other 2 you are alluding to are.... SiS, VIA?

Re:Better headline: AMD's Radeon R9 290 Slashverti

[aliquis]

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.

Re:Are PC gamers benefiting ?

[Moryath]

Better question: what game actually requires this?

Seriously now. Unless you're trying to just throw money away on some 6-screen rig or something, a single-screen at 1920x1080 will run almost all games of today fine from 3-year-old cards. "Bleeding edge" is a function of throwing your money away on diminishing returns problems.

Re:Are PC gamers benefiting ?

[epyT-R]

Depends on what point those diminishing returns start to diminish for you. Having a high framerate is nice, while having max texture and shader detail turned on at the same time. You don't need the million dollar sports car to get you to work, but that doesnt' mean it isn't nice.

Re:Better headline: AMD's Radeon R9 290 Slashverti

[Rockoon]

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.

Who needs a Bugatti Veyron?

[GauteL]

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.