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
Or whelmed in any manner?
We haven't see any real verified independent testing!?!?
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One of the improvement of R9 290X comparing to 7970 is the addition of 2 more raster engines, which help a lot in high AA situations. Benching the card with no AA is simply pointless.
they have really changed and are doing their best with drivers. i havent had a major issue in a long time. true people have diff driver versions that they stick to, but they are continually trying. and TAKING FEEDBACK.
tbh, i had more driver probs with my gts450 than i ever did with my HD 4650 or my current 7790.
my GTS450 might have even actually even died from the 14. something drivers.
My friend with his HD 4770 had absolutely no issues with it in the 4 years he's had it, except for the it being built cheap, since it as a model Gigabyte cheaped out on and used less VRAs and low quality VRAM... and that has nothing to do with AMD.
Another friend of mine is building a i7 4820K rig right now, and he'll be going for a R9 280X CFX, can't wait to bench that beast.
As for me, I don't know what I'll be getting, I want to see the price/performance both Hawaiis bring, and if it's better than a GTX 770 (what I originally wanted, now irrelevant because of R9 280X), I'll save up for one of them.
but if AMD could make stable and simple driver i consider to try this card :D
Being a long time EVGA Nvidia buyer I can appreciate that when I had a issue all I had to do was fill out a report and next driver release the issue was fixed and hasn't show up since.
Something I got use to being fix or broken with every Nvidia driver update.