AMD Radeon R9 290 Review: Fast And $400, But Is It Consistent?

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Now you are just doing what you accuse him off. Stop generalizing.
Titan is a rip-off, PERIOD.

The GTX780 IS a slightly nerfed Titan. Geesh.
 
Hey everyone, can we please remain objective and not act like children fighting over toys?

I've seen the community deteriorate to the point that i'm seriously considering going over to Tech Report...they have their trolls but a lot of good discussion happens in their forums and comment threads...

...just like on Tom's, one or two years ago...
 


To me it looks like all aftermarket will bring is Toms two retail cards up to (MAYBE) press review cards. Either the two retails are the worst examples on the planet or even an aftermarket on RETAIL will barely catch the press cards, or to match them it seems like they may end up being just as noisy. Those press cards are nearly 20% faster than the 290x retail. That's a heck of a lot of perf to lose at retail for a FASTER (supposedly) 290x card right? And in 1080p the 290x is 20% faster than retail 290x. Actual 20.6% faster than retail.

IE BF4 290x press card 68.9fps
RETAIL 290x 57.1! OUCH. If toms numbers are correct and are applied to retail, you'll only get 13-20% from a great fan/heatsink right? Which would merely bring the retail up to all the press cards correct? If 290 is worse what happens then? Are we looking at a card that's stomped by a 770? What price will these cards cost with a much better cooling solution attached?

I will really laugh (on the outside...on the inside I'll be say WTH did AMD do this for) if NV releases a driver called something like "noisy high watt amd level driver to smash 290x - install for amd like noise/watts today" ...Download now for free 780 upgrade that blows AMD away again...

I really hope NV doesn't do this, but I would as a business because they can and AMD DID, heck they did it in response to price drops which is even worse than a plan it was a knee-jerk reaction.. I would be making fun of this for the next two months, and be presenting Toms' retail results in my youtube vids explaining the whole AMD perf situation here (NV has a youtube channel, as does AMD, but curiously AMD's has less than 1/2 the vids - less funding I guess). My cards would be running 94c tomorrow instead of 81c. Why not? This is all AMD did here. There is nothing more NV needs to do than pull this crap and make fun all month. I would have 2 drivers on my site. "the AMD is crap driver-we can do that too" version (the hot and noisy like AMD version? make up any funny name they want) and a release driver for the rest of us who hate noise :)

Add Gsync, 3 AAA games etc and I go home with NV. I'd probably sell the games, but Gsync is going to be HUGE for the life of my card and next monitor purchase. Only if purchasing today of course. IMHO everyone should wait for 20nm (no matter who you like) being we're this close to their release, unless your gpu just died today...LOL. They should be able to double the cores so I'm thinking worst case we get 780+50% out of the next cards even if they clock them with a refresh in mind.

AMD for me is out until they match Gsync or license it. I could even swallow a 10% hit just for this feature next year. Even if 20nm AMD is faster I will go NV for Gsync. I'm not even sure a 10%+$100 cheaper price could woo me. I want no stutter, tearing or lag. Before that was a dream, now we know you can buy it today. I hated all 3 for years. I would be wary of recommending these cards to anyone until I see other retails benched that are far better than Toms retails. Even then as noted, for myself there is no AMD until Gsync or like stuff is onboard.
 
Chris, what retail 290X did you receive from Newegg? Your results are very different when compared to benchmarks from actual card owners at OCN



Tom's results differ drastically from real world results from owners...

Also, Gsync requires compatible monitors which demand a $100-150 premium over similar monitors without Gsync. In addition, you are basing your purchasing decision on unproven technology. I guess ignorance is bliss :)
 
And to clarify a point from my R9 290X review: Hawaii doesn’t offer 1/4-rate double-precision compute like Tahiti did. Instead, AMD drops DP performance to one-eighth of the chip’s FP32 throughput, and instead saves the more potent compute potential for its FirePro cards, taking a page out of Nvidia’s playbook. That makes the 290’s peak floating-point performance about 4.84 TFLOPS, while its DP rate is 606 GFLOPS.
Click to expand...
That's dandy ... All we need need is AMD to follow NVidia down the toilet as far as business practices go.
 


:lol::lol::lol:

Religious debate is almost as heated as AMD vs Intel / Nvidia... Careful...
 
"AMD’s scheme undoubtedly suffers a lack of clarity, and after piling praise onto the R9 290X’s value story, I now have to hope that Nvidia doesn’t follow AMD down this muddy little rabbit hole."

Turbo Boost sends his regards.

Cheers!
 
If you have to buy the Arctic Accelero Extreme III the cards lose their $100 value. Still better performance is better performance which also adds value even if you spend as much as on the Nvidia cards after buying an aftermarket cooler.
 
If you have to buy the Arctic Accelero Extreme III the cards lose their $100 value. Still better performance is better performance which also adds value even if you spend as much as on the Nvidia cards after buying an aftermarket cooler.
 


GELID ICY VISION Rev 2 are $40... or you can wait a few weeks for non-reference cards to hit the market...


Chris, this was the first time in any GPU review where it became mandatory to add (claimed) next to the TDP of the cards on the first page even though the TDP is 250W and the power consumption benchmarks even show that the cards are well below this figure. Was this truly necessary? I guess you are going to be deleting a lot more posts about how your reviews are biased based on subtle things like this or the fact that you have now instigated a myth about how AMD retail cards vastly under-perform press cards...
 
This reminds me of the GTX 480 vs the HD 5870. The performance of the GTX 480 was close to the HD 5870 at launch even though it consumed more power. But, over time (with driver improvements), the GTX 480 destroyed the HD 5870. Also, it is not like the GTX 480 was consuming more power because the Fermi architecture was inefficient. Nvidia just implemented technologies that could offset CPU load and add new forms of gameplay <<think about the destructible objects PhysX demos>>. In this generation of GPUs, the tables have turned.

Consider these points:
1) GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 are not the same. We haven't begun to see what the R9 290 can do yet because the GCN 1.1 drivers are still immature. Whether or not AMD can make decent drivers for the R9 290 depends on consumer support. I'm sure most of you know that Nvidia has ~65% of the discrete GPU market share. This fact allows Nvidia the luxury of allocating more resources towards driver optimizations. If AMD had just 40% of the dGPU market share, the quality of their drivers would significantly improve because they would have more resources and a greater incentive to improve their drivers.
2) The reference cooler of the R9 290 sucks <<see point 19 of this review>>. The R9 290 will have more thermal headroom to work with at a later date. The retail performance numbers show an under clocked card. The people who are not patient enough to wait for custom coolers are most likely willing to turn the fan speed up.
3) Even though CUDA is currently better than OpenCL, it is proprietary and therefore cannot be used to offset CPU load or add new dynamics to gameplay <<you only get more eye candy in a few game titles>>. Since the CPUs of the next gen consoles are awful, next gen games will utilize the GPGPU capabilities of the GCN architecture. The definition of a gaming GPU is about to change because the untapped GPGPU potential of the GCN architecture will be utilized by next gen consoles.
<<Last Note: I think Mantle will suffer the same fate as PhysX in the gaming world.>>
 
Now a $400 780 killer, this release just keeps getting better and better. I am excited for some aftermarket cooling to start shipping on these bad boys. These cards are beating significantly more expensive cards and they are not even running at full speed, priceless.
 


You accuse me of generalizing but then do it yourself in one sentence...LOL.
"Titan is a rip-off, PERIOD."
I'll just prove that completely ridiculous for a LOT of it's users and ask you to stop trolling please. FYI 780 is only a nerfed GAMER titan, but for pro people it gets slaughtered by Titan.

How is what I said generalizing? I stated exactly who it's being bought by. Pro users who can't afford a Tesla or in rare cases Gamers with way too much money to burn (and even said a better buy is the 780). I was very specific but my statement covers everyone IMHO. Do you understand why they will release a 780TI and have no need to DROP the price on Titan? Because PROS using Cuda don't care, it's $1500 off of a $2500 Tesla. There is no generalizing here. It's exactly why this is staying $1000 and has had no cut announced. We might see a Titan Ultra or Pro added, but it will be $1000 again! This card is for DP and Cuda with the gaming part as a bonus, not the other way around especially with $500 cards matching the game perf (or even just getting close).

More importantly people can buy TWO of these and save $500 on a Tesla. No generalization there either. That is AMAZING price/perf to these people. These are the facts of life. :) Clearly in a WORK environment you buy Tesla's so you can call up NV and say hey, Blender/Adobe etc etc just crashed out on me...FIX IT. You will get help (that's what the extra $1500 on top of Titan is for). But at home I'd buy 2 titans and laugh saving $500 or if I'm not rich enough to do that I still buy ONE and laugh.

What the heck did I ACCUSE him of? I said "I don't think you understand what a titan is bought for usually".. And then explained exactly what I meant (so he'd GET IT). Many of Titan's reviews call this out exactly as I've stated it. I didn't ACCUSE him of anything. I basically POLITELY called him IGNORANT :) Which still isn't accusing him of anything. If I had said he was LYING for example, you could say I'm accusing him of something. Saying you don't understand something and accusing someone of say, lying (or whatever you seem to think I accused him of) are two VERY different things. I'm ignorant when it comes to cars. Not stupid mind you (I can learn about cars if desired), I just don't know how to replace my engine etc because I have no desire to. I'm assuming if he looked up the PRO app benchmarks for the Titan he would get it as I wasn't calling him stupid (thus I explained assuming he'd get it- GET IT? :) ). It gets discussed as a gamer card, but that's not why they leave the shelves in droves (and will continue to sell well), and it's not why the price is remaining $1000. You would price cut this card if it was all about gaming as clearly a 780TI looks to dominate it shortly and a 290x comes pretty close for 1/2 off right? Heck the 290 comes close for even less (though maybe not the retail cards of either model..ROFL).

If NV cut this card any more they probably would start to have problems selling tesla to some people. I mean at $500 you buy 4 of these and save $500 over that Tesla now right? I think a few companies would bite for those prices. If it was aimed at gamers for real they'd drop the price to reality. But again it was only sold to gamers to claim a crown. I believe it bit them in the butt a bit when smart people realized it was a Tesla, causing them to fly off the shelves since inception. It's not all bad though, as they made the Tesla audience larger (sort of) since it sells to work people who want to do some stuff at home but wouldn't touch a Tesla at home from their personal wallets. The WORK environment still needs FULL support and probably rarely skimps and buys Titans in their place. But again, drop that to $500 or something or a reasonable gaming perf based price and I think that story changes some.

From Toms Titan review:
"The GK104 GPU was designed with gaming in mind, which is why each of its SMX blocks only sports eight FP64-capable units. GK110 conversely gets 64 FP64 CUDA cores per SMX, totaling 896 across the GPU. "

"Conversely" it says...So opposite of gaming right? Cuda isn't used in game playing so again, while they used it to get a crown, it's true power is largely wasted on us. You are GENERALIZING by ignoring a HUGE part of it's audience (whether Nvidia likes it or not; it was the price of tossing GK110 into a game priced card).

Heck check the title of one of their reviews here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-gk110-review,3438.html
"Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan 6 GB: GK110 On A Gaming Card"
So GK110 isn't for GAMING it was retrofitted basically...Ahh right, it's from a $2500 PRO CARD and those people are attracted to it.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-opencl-cuda-workstation,3474-16.html
Performs like a Tesla in Cuda, nearly 3x faster than 680, and a over 2 x faster than 580. It's a good 6x faster than i7-3770. It does a ton of damage on the next page in octane also (which can be used as a plugin for MANY cuda apps). Blender Cycles BTW doesn't even work right according to blender's site, as AMD hardware is lacking in ways a driver maybe can't even fix.
"OpenCL support for AMD is currently on hold. Only a small subset of the entire rendering kernel can currently be compiled, which leaves this mostly at prototype. We will need major driver or hardware improvements to get full cycles support on AMD hardware. For NVidia CUDA still works faster, and Intel integrated GPU's are unlikely to give any speed improvement over CPU rendering."

Depending on what you're doing (like Blender) a Titan is 3x faster than a $3600 Quadro 6000 from newegg:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-19.html
Check all the Cuda benchmarks in that review. It destroys all Quadros in every cuda benchmark. Note again, that a top quadro is $3600 ($5000 for the 12GB model). If you put this card in the right situation you save some serious cash! Very specific, but a large portion of it's buyers no doubt, though not what I'd call common or widespread. We're still talking a small amount of cards and a small audience. Nothing vague about what I'm saying here either.

So clearly Titan wasn't designed for games. Which most of us already know, it's a TESLA. Which is why for most people who are buying this it's awesome even buying TWO! People who are buying this card are not exactly common and I'm not saying they are. They buy it for a specific reason which is the massive savings or like I said, they're just rich with cash to burn. I've just described ALL cases I think. I don't really count serious OC'ers but again, you're rich doing this with $1000 cards anyway - if I torched $1000 card from OC'ing I'd be brought to tears (I can afford the card, but not to perhaps destroy it), never mind people doing it with 3 or 4 of these. I don't know any poor people with a Titan...LOL. How many different ways does it need to be said for it not to be generalizing to you? Even if I did generalize, who cares if it's all true?...LOL. You could have said it's a ripoff for GAMERS, but not PERIOD for all people. You not only generalized here, you were WRONG generally speaking...ROFL.

You've opened yourself up to me saying much worse to you, but instead I argued with the data which pretty much speaks for itself anyway, destroying any claim of it being a ripoff - "PERIOD"... I'll refrain from...well, acting like you 😉 Again, quit trolling. Your statements are baseless.
 
I don't understand AMD at all with those crappy coolers... Considering the ammount of money they spend on the disign of their GPU is it really that hard to invest extra few milons $ into design of high end coolers? I mean, if they could make R9 290X to run at 1 GHZ all the time then it would beat the s*** out of any other card on the market. And I'm sure that custom coolers will achive it for extra what? $50? Just make a decent coolers for your reference design just to shut up all the haters.. Please..
 


I think it is time for you to calm down. Because we talk gaming here and Titan is in the chart for comparison's sake. Why? Because Titan launched as a flagship gaming card that can compute. GTX 780 is the little brother of Titan, until the Ti arrives. Kudos to Nvidia for making a card that is good in both compute and gaming. It is something that deserves appreciation. However, the point here is not that. R9 290/X is INDEED a Titan slayer due to its price AND gaming performance combined, if we are looking from this perspective. In this view, prosumer features of Titan aren't so relevant to the gamer. But, for the fact that Titan was launched as a gaming flagship, it is in the chart for comparison's sake. There are probably people that bought Titan just for gaming purpose, as you said earlier.
 
Well as a long time AMD fan this is both great news and cause for concern. That disparity between retail and press cards is disturbing to say the least. I am also curious if a proper cooling solution would rectify that problem. As to why I like AMD well much like their CPU's the Hawaii line looks to be power hungry and hot but will shine if power is not a concern and pampered by someone who knows what their doing. I'm looking forward to what I can do with one of these with a proper water cooling setup.
 
Boy this is pretty funny watching people defend or bash like their lives depend on it.

What I take away from this is the following:

1. Hawaii and Hawaii XT perform very well, or at least the press parts do. It is not uncommon for the press parts to be cherry picked.

2. The stock cooling sucks. That's very normal. Even Titans cooling compared to after market is pretty bad.

3. People get up in arms and defend companies as if they are their best friends.

The reality is that NVidia and AMD both will screw you price wise if they can. I am pretty sure AMD kept the price at $550 because they knew NVidia was planning a price drop and rather than have it at $700 and NVidia undercutting them to hell there is now only a $50 dollar disparity between the 290X and 780 which is good. I hope for cheaper prices.
 
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