Cybrnook2002Great deals! I picked up a second 290X lightning for crossfire.

If I did not already own a R9 290X XFX Reference card, I would pick this up the Lightning card for sure. My only disappointment is that the reference card does not support UEFI GOP mode. :(

TheGuruStudNvidia sends in so many programmers to control game optimization...it's like the stazi. Devs are afraid of them. They will never say a bad thing about Nvidia unless they want fired. Devs haven't had control of their games in years.

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.

There's nothing new here, but thanks for shedding light on the dark activities of this nefarious company. nVidia has been trying to screw us over so many times I've lost count. But here's just a few examples:

1) They didn't compensate owners of laptops equipped with nVidia GPUs (I myself had a Toshiba Tecra that died because of this infamous 'bumpgate' scandal).
2) They were behind many tech websites maintaining that 2GB was 'more than enough' graphics memory during the GTX670/GTX680 launches, when AMD was selling 3GB 7950 and 7970 cards, and there was already a lot of evidence that 2GB was inadequate. So these nVidia cards were obsolete right out of the box. What a scam.
3) They've tried to corner the PC gaming markets using tactics like the above-mentioned 'game optimizations', which were really just intended to make the game run worse on AMD hardware, rather than well on nVidia hardware. PhysX was an even more blatant example of this kind of nonsense, introducing utterly useless additional effects merely for the sake of locking out AMD cards from rendering the game identically. Now that AMD has wisely grabbed the gaming consoles, I'm pretty sure many of these efforts to cheat/threaten developers will subside, but we must remain ever-vigilant.
4) G-Sync is their latest attempt to insult our intelligence by implementing a proprietary, locked version of a technology that most monitors can already essentially support. They just want an excuse to put a green goblin logo on the monitor and charge us $100 extra for the same monitor as a freesync-enabled version, while locking out AMD cards. This will likely be their biggest failure yet, as freesync monitors will be out within a month, and it wouldn't surprise me if the manufactures didn't make all their monitors freesync-capable going forward, since it wouldn't cost them practically anything to do it, and it will give them another checkbox feature.
5) Finally, more recently, Jen Hsun and his minions have picked millions of pockets by dishonestly selling a '4GB' GTX970 card that can really only address 3.5GB of memory at full speed. How many of those millions would have thought twice about those GTX970s if they'd known about this issue before they bought?

Personally, I went with a $260 Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 standard edition card just before Christmas, and flashed the bios with the R9 290 O/C bios (available on this very website here: www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/
! Thanks TechPowerUp !) and now it runs at 1050MHz rock solid stable. It runs quiet and cool, and it was more than $100 less than the flawed GTX970.

I think we should just say no to nVidia at this point, at least until they're really hurting. That would be a fitting punishment for all this crap they've been pulling.

I'm down with that... say no to ngreedia!!!

ManofGodIf I did not already own a R9 290X XFX Reference card, I would pick this up the Lightning card for sure. My only disappointment is that the reference card does not support UEFI GOP mode. :(

Not to go off topic, but seems it's not ALL reference cards. Just the BIOS XFX used. And even with that, seems there "might?" be a UEFI compatible BIOS for the XFX reference card:

www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/xfx-r9-290x-not-uefi.205450/

Might want to PM with XFXSupport TPU member.

Cybrnook2002Not to go off topic, but seems it's not ALL reference cards. Just the BIOS XFX used. And even with that, seems there "might?" be a UEFI compatible BIOS for the XFX reference card:

www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/xfx-r9-290x-not-uefi.205450/

Might want to PM with XFXSupport TPU member.

We only have 1 documented case that i can think of where a customer had a 290x that wasn't uefi compatible, but wasn't tested in house, nor was the motherboard tested.

As a rule, we like to address the motherboard first and see if its not an Issue with R9 GPU's first, then visit the UEFI settings. contact me so we can investigate this further or open a ticket at xfxsupport.com. Thank you

Maban@btarunr What's the source of that AMD propaganda image? Is it actually from AMD?

Yes. twitter.com/amd_roy/status/561222965023363073