Monday, September 23rd 2013
Radeon R9 290X Pictured, Tested, Beats Titan
Here are the first pictures of AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. If the naming caught you off-guard, our older article on AMD's new nomenclature could help. Pictured below is the AMD reference-design board of the R9 290X. It's big, and doesn't have too much going on with its design. At least it doesn't look Fisher Price like its predecessor. This reference design card is all that you'll be able to buy initially, and non-reference design cards could launch much later.
With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.
It gets better, the source also put out benchmark figures.
The R9 290X is significantly faster than NVIDIA's GeForce TITAN graphics card among the two games it was tested on, Aliens vs. Predators 3, and Battlefield 3. It all boils down to pricing. AMD could cash in on its performance premium, by overpricing the card much like it did with HD 7990 "Malta," or it could torch NVIDIA's high-end lineup by competitively pricing the card.
Source:
DG's Nerdy Story
With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.
The R9 290X is significantly faster than NVIDIA's GeForce TITAN graphics card among the two games it was tested on, Aliens vs. Predators 3, and Battlefield 3. It all boils down to pricing. AMD could cash in on its performance premium, by overpricing the card much like it did with HD 7990 "Malta," or it could torch NVIDIA's high-end lineup by competitively pricing the card.
142 Comments on Radeon R9 290X Pictured, Tested, Beats Titan
Yeah I said it!!!
What do you expect? We should all fully expect AMD's next gen release to beat Nvidia's last gen king. Despite it's name the Titan is still nothing more than a huge die compute centric Kepler card. The architecture is OLD.
I'm disappointed that in those benchmarks, AMD's card doesn't win EVERY metric. If you look at the source material - now password protected from web site DGNerdy(?) the new AMD card loses to Titan by 10% in Bioshock Infinite. It doesn't beat it hands down and that's bad news.
This is AMD's next gen release - it has to be the best. If it's not - it's frankly very disappointing. I want it to destroy Titan. Then i can go and buy a single AMD gpu and play with the voltage and not worry about Nvidia's bloody nanny state gfx card protection meddling.
I hope these benchmarks are wrong. I hope the card is better.
a facepalm'able worthy comment if i ever heard one...
Heres the 6970....
and heres the R9 290X pictured in the first post.
'More performance' would mean you require a pilots license, a space suit, and ear protection because that leaf blower will be blowing so hard it will defy any laws of gravity and launch your PC into the stratosphere and deafen you in the process.
- We are still at 28nm
- The core is much smaller
- You can't expect a card to win in every game because many games are written that way that a specific architecture have the advantage, even if it is worst than the competition.
Either these benchmarks are fake or that's a severely under performing ES card they have there, AMD needs to release a card that soundly beats Kepler at a reasonable price, otherwise they're setting themselves up for failure come Q1'14 when Maxwell is released, and we can expect another round of $650~1000 cards from the green team...
Core size is far less relevant than what the die space comprises of. It's still reckoned to be one of AMD's biggest dies. So 28nm or not, the efficiency of the architecture is paramount.
Bioshock is also an AMD sponsored title - should play better on their hardware, not worse.
There is no point in AMD releasing a card that cannot comfortably surpass the competitors flagship. The early benches also show that the Titan beats the unnamed Radeon card in every synthetic benchmark (and I know we all know benchmarks mean nothing).
I guess we all need to see what happens on Wednesday. I'm not surprised if it beats Nvidia's greatest in most metrics. But again, clocks and maximum overhead play a huge role.
Hell, an overclocked well cooled 780 beats a stock Titan.
If I'm wrong and it doesn't hump Titan, I really hope it has a lot of headroom (some sources say it doesn't). It will be a bit dull if the two cards are close.
Let me add something here. I do understand why you say that a company needs the top card. Someone reads the Titan's review and then goes out and buys a GT640 expecting to get a small Titan. Well this is changing with APUs. Low end market is changing from very important to non existing.:)It will have a strong game bundle and a much lower price. Nothing more in my opinion, and hopefully performance close or equal to Titan.