Thursday, January 29th 2015
AMD Cashes in On GTX 970 Drama, Cuts R9 290X Price
AMD decided to cash-in on the GeForce GTX 970 memory controversy, with a bold move and a cheap (albeit accurate) shot. The company is making its add-in board (AIB) partners lower pricing of its Radeon R9 290X graphics card, which offers comparable levels of performance to the GTX 970, down to as low as US $299.
And then there's a gentle reminder from AMD to graphics card buyers with $300-ish in their pockets. With AMD, "4 GB means 4 GB." AMD also emphasizes that the R9 290 and R9 290X can fill their 4 GB video memory to the last bit, and feature a 512-bit wide memory interface, which churns up 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth at reference clocks, something the GTX 970 can't achieve, even with its fancy texture compression mojo.
And then there's a gentle reminder from AMD to graphics card buyers with $300-ish in their pockets. With AMD, "4 GB means 4 GB." AMD also emphasizes that the R9 290 and R9 290X can fill their 4 GB video memory to the last bit, and feature a 512-bit wide memory interface, which churns up 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth at reference clocks, something the GTX 970 can't achieve, even with its fancy texture compression mojo.
181 Comments on AMD Cashes in On GTX 970 Drama, Cuts R9 290X Price
Excited for the 380X already.....
Is not happy.
Reference cooler? Yea, that's another story, lol
Crysis 2 is a standout example. I can't remember if that's the one where the devs refused to even comment or not, though. Nvidia was basically allowed full control and pumped in massive amounts of tesselation for flat surfaces. IIRC, there was even an underground river getting rendered. 17% slowdown on nvidia and 30% on AMD. The gtx 580 could churn through tesselation much better. Nvidia dropped this tactic when the new AMD cards came out with heavy tess firepower.
U$ 280 After Rebate... R9 290X (non-Reference cooler)... 4GB VRAM - 512bits...
U$ 350 -> GTX 970 (msi or Asus) = 3,5GB VRAM - 256 bits....
You can pay JUST U$ 70 for 4,7 frames (the graph use an reference R9 290X)....
Temperature... Noise... etc... etc...
mine GTX 970 MSI gaming 4GB is coming home, but i'm not happy cause i'm going to use it on 3 FHD displays, and yes, need some extra video memory...
It seems a bit silly to complain over gddr usage when the performance is there.
If they return them then im not sure what you would buy instead of a 970 possibly a 780ti? Although i still think id prefer a 970.
the 290x is a powerful card but i dont think id chose one over the 970 simply for heat reasons.
So it is when you stand constructional problems in software drivers and this then it bites you in the ass nVidia. However, please note that this lesson will not sobered them up. I want to see fall to the bottom and then they will begin again to respected customers . We live in an age of information and misinformation, and it seems that nVidia is more on the misinformation .Many blindly buy and do not know how many tricks are here ..
AMD R9-290x is much better card regardless of the FPS is much more stable operation and 512 paips ,remember ,6 monitors....Tf"ps !!!!!!!!!!!!! A.S.O.