Slashdot Mirror
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,
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.
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.
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.