Introduction

AMD's Radeon R9 290X high-end graphics card finally hit the road. When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX TITAN this March, and at a time when the GeForce GTX 690 had already established a performance lead over AMD, it wasn't just an effort by the company to step up profit margins, but to also dominate AMD's product stack with an unassailable performance lead for a single-GPU product, and then go on to charge a bitter $999 for it. NVIDIA pulled that off for seven months running and is now faced with AMD's response, the $549 Radeon R9 290X we review today.

The Radeon R9 290X is an important product for AMD because it's the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months). AMD's other late 2013 graphics card launches, led by the Radeon R9 280X, are merely rebrands of the company's close to two-year old HD 7000 series, with price adjustments and repositioning within the product-stack. We must point out that NVIDIA didn't handle its lineup any differently. Barring the GTX TITAN and its cut-down GTX 780, the rest of the GTX 700 lineup is largely derived from the previous generation GTX 600 series. Under the Radeon R9 290X's skin is the swanky new 6.2 billion-transistor "Hawaii" silicon. Built on the existing 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process, it has solid credentials on paper, looking NVIDIA's GTX TITAN and the GK110 silicon it's based on right in the eye.

AMD is also harping about two technological extras over the GTX TITAN: Hardware support for Direct3D 11.2 and a new game audio hardware acceleration technology it calls TrueAudio. Among the two, Direct3D 11.2 stands a lesser chance of being labeled "gimmicky" because a few top PC game developers have expressed interest in the performance-enhancing features the API brings to the table, and it's the standard 3D graphics API for the Xbox One entertainment system. We're not nearly as enthusiastic about TrueAudio because we're not adequately convinced of it being any different from something sound card manufacturers already tried and failed to cash in on.



At $549.99, the Radeon R9 290X is priced "high" by AMD's standards, as the company's high-end, single-GPU products are typically priced in the $399 to $549 range. However, its pricing could be appealing to those contemplating a $620 GTX 780 or, worse still, the $999 GTX TITAN. We will then also put the Radeon R9 290X through its paces to see if AMD's pricing is defensive or offensive (against NVIDIA).

Architecture

As mentioned earlier, the Radeon R9 290X is AMD's genuinely new high-end graphics chip, and it hence introduces a few new features. Codenamed "Hawaii," the silicon that drives the R9 290X packs a staggering 6.2 billion transistors and is built on the existing 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process, which we imagine should have achieved a good level of maturity by now (good yields). The very fact that AMD is now offering a product with a 6.2 billion transistor chip and 16 GDDR5 memory chips, let alone how well it ends up performing, shows that the GeForce GTX TITAN is a very high-margin product.



Internally, "Hawaii" features the same component hierarchy as "Tahiti," and is an upscale in many respects. While "Tahiti" features 2,048 stream processors, the number-crunching machinery of the chip across two shader engines, "Hawaii" features 2,816 stream processors across four shader engines. As you may have guessed, stream processors are not all that make up a shader engine. It has several other key components and by itself features a vast majority of the components that go into building a GPU. For instance, the stream processors inside a shader engine are arranged into groups of 64 called compute units (CUs).



In each of the four shader engines on "Hawaii," there are 11 compute units (CUs). A CU combines scalar and vector number crunching machinery into neatly organized blocks that are fed data and instructions by a scheduler told on how to go about number crunching by scalar and vector registers, and cushioned by caches at various levels.

Apart from compute units, a shader engine features a geometry processor, a key component tasked with computing geometry in a 3D scene. It combines geometry and vertex assemblers, and a tessellator, a component specialized in processing extremely complex geometric shapes. Since "Hawaii" features four shader engines and in turn four geometry processor, it features four independent tessellation units, double that of the previous generation.



Also inside the shader engine is the Rasterizer, a pre-rendering stage, and Render back-ends, a post-rendering stage. Each CU features 16 raster operations units (ROPs) for a total of 64 ROPs on "Hawaii," the highest number of ROPs on a GPU yet.

Processing loads to the four shader engines are managed by a Command Processor, a global data share that distributes data tagged along with the right instructions; and a unified 1 megabyte L3 cache which cushions data between the rest of the GPU and the memory controllers. 1 megabyte may seem infinitesimal compared to the amount of memory the R9 290X features, but the speed at which the cache serves its function as a scratchpad more than makes up for it.

"Hawaii" is the industry's first graphics processor to feature a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, double the width of "Cayman" and 33 percent wider than "Tahiti." The standard memory amount on the card is set at 4 GB, but don't be surprised if a few crazy AIBs go ahead and launch 8 GB variants in the future. The GPU core operates at 1000 MHz and the memory at 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective), which translates into a staggering 320 GB/s memory bandwidth.

"Hawaii" takes advantage of the PCI-Express Gen 3.0 x16 bus interface. Other miscellaneous components include specialized hardware for high-resolution video acceleration (UVD), a hardware video CODEC engine (VCE), specialized hardware for the TrueAudio positional audio processing pipeline, and the display controllers with support for up to six displays.

DirectX 11.2

We'd like to slip in a quick note about DirectX 11.2. DirectX 10.1 was only supported by AMD graphics cards, before the DirectX 11 era began, which greatly limited its adoption by game developers. Today's scenario is vastly different. Although NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 700 and the GTX TITAN don't support DirectX 11.2 and can only emulate certain effects over DirectX 11.0, AMD has a good shot at turning its DirectX 11.2 hardware support into a genuine advantage. AMD has vastly better developer relations than it did three years ago, and its DirectX 11.2-ready hardware drives the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4. Microsoft could, on its part, encourage game developers to take advantage of DirectX 11.2 due to its single most interesting feature, Tiled Resources.

Analogous to OpenGL mega-textures, Tiled Resources is a feature game developers take to because it utilizes monolithic, large textures instead of countless small ones in a 3D scene by allocating portions of the texture to covering various objects on demand. This is a tangibly more efficient method of resource management and heralds a kind of virtual-memory system for GPUs. Proliferation of DirectX 11.2 doesn't just have lack of adoption by NVIDIA as a roadblock, there's also the OS limitation. DirectX 11.2 is not supported on Windows 7 and requires Windows 8.1, yet Windows 8 and its successor, Windows 8.1, are incredibly unpopular with PC gamers (at least our forum members) due to the idiotic user-interface that insults our intelligence.

Packaging and Contents

We received the card without packaging or accessories from AMD. Rest assured that the final product will come with the usual documentation, driver CD, and adapters.