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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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
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.