First Official AMD Radeon R9 290X Benchmarks

[ubercake]

We always get hyped up over these AMD cards and their driver team lets us down. I hope this generation of rebrands really solves the runt/dropped/microstutter issues with AMD cards. Yeah its great to have high frame rates, but when the screens a-flutter in crossfire as we've seen in the past with AMD cards, there's no value or quality in the performance.

I really hope they are focused on addressing these things. They haven't fixed the Eyefinity issues either.

If something doesn't work right but posts high framerates, how does that compare with something that does work correctly with slightly lower frame rates?

Don't get me wrong, I really want AMD to do well because I'm personally tired of giving Nvidia so much of my money, but to this point, if AMD can't get two cards working correctly with all AAA titles, I can't even consider their tech a choice. I won't settle for high-speed junk performance.

 

[godzigga]

@dgingeri I'll attempt to reword what he is saying, "I am not allowed to say anything else at this point. We are still in the lab testing the 290x against multiple other cards running at 3840x2160. The 290x does well against the GTX 780 (which is seen in the above benchmarks). There are also other cards we are testing that the 290x does well against..."

Read into that what you will but he is basically saying that there are cards better than the GTX 780 that the 290x competes well with which essentially leaves the GTX Titan, GTX 690 and HD 7990 as cards that we would care about it competing well against that aren't a GTX 780.

 

[016ive]

So far so good, but I think AMD advantage at this Resolution is the 512bit bus width. Anyway I can't wait to see the other benchmarks . Nice going AMD 😀

 

[RussK1]

AMD its forcing nVidia to drop prices, that aint ''sitting pretty'' lol. if the 290x does well against titan.. whats the point of buying a 1k $ card when a prob 600$ card can match it and prob beat it?. bring up the ''maxxwell'' thing and so does amd has volcanic island for next year as far as i know not sure. just my opinion

It won't be $600... closer to $750. Hopefully it won't be a repeat of the 7970 launch... 8 months to get drivers working then plagued with latency issues.

 

[Guest]

Titan cannot be overclocked I think I read that somewhere so. AMD is probably the winner.

 

[oxiide]

Wow, if Nvidia don't do something, they'll get obliterated in every price range...

There shouldn't be much surprise here.. AMD wouldn't be releasing a competing solution yet if they didn't already know it was better than Titan in some way. AMD has had months to look over GK110 and its popularity at a stable price, and it would be a pretty horrible failure if by now they still couldn't compete with it.

Plus, AMD has often been ahead of Nvidia in sheer value at several given price points. It usually hasn't mattered; Nvidia is quite stubborn with pricing because they do fine regardless.

huh? It seems from the numbers you just put up that the R9 290X does very well against the GTX780. I'm confused. the words and the graphs seems to be contradicting each other.

"...it doesn't just do well against the GTX 780," implying it does well against something else, too.

 

[blcskate]

dgingeri, It says it doesn't "JUST" do well against the GeForce GTX 780. Which means it is putting up good number against other cards as well. I think you read it without the "just" being in there. The numbers are looking good, but any card can post good results on certain designed games. The problem I have had with AMD for a long time is simply driver support. Works good on the couple games they certify, but anything else the performance is sub-par.

 

[LePhuronn]

My Titan cost me £600 and I have more VRAM than I'll ever use. Excellent stuff from AMD to finally get some silicon back to a competitive level, but I think I can rest easy now.

Plus I bet you a fiver AMD's noise and power consumption will still be ridiculous compared to Nvidia's 700 series.

 

[bigshootr8]

Very impressive on the 290x side however if the 780 is a bit cheaper it will still be a bit more appealing. Also, both games shown tomb raider and bioshock were AMD optimized games so its hard to take it to seriously. The way I see is this if AMD comes out and prices the 290x around $750 and Nvidia prices the 780 under $700 it'll make for a compelling argument to skip the 290x well unless you want to take advantage of mantle. I'll be more impressed with the next gen after AMD and Nvidia are done with their refresher and 1 new card at the high end.

 

[dgingeri]

Ah, now I see where I went wrong. I read it wrong and saw "it just doesn't do well" instead of "it doesn't just do well." Now I see.

 

[John Bauer]

Titan cannot be overclocked I think I read that somewhere so. AMD is probably the winner.

And where did you read this...?
What cave have you been living in? The one over by the East Ave dunes?

 

[redeemer]

Why is everyone so surprised of course AMD's flagship will beat the GTX 780 and Titan, the problem is pricing for Nvidia, how much will they drop the price of the Titan? Once Mantle is a reality how much farther will the performance gap be??

 

[EvilGeniusBC]

Just a quick conversation question:
I have a 6970 and run a single 1920x1080p, its still a solid card but would there be a big enough improvement over it to lean towards a 290x or is a card like that and the titan more geared towards bigger screens or eyefinity/crossfire screen set ups? Thanks - cheers - all

 

[viliu24]

price , we want the price , pointless a titan competitor with same or higher price.In the end is about price/performance relation

 

[TeddyShotgun]

@LePhuronn "Plus I bet you a fiver AMD's noise and power consumption will still be ridiculous compared to Nvidia's 700 series."

While in the past AMD cards have had serious power consumption and heat problems (7990), this is a new GPU architecture. Just like the old Fermi architecture that had really bad heat problems when Nvidias cards rolled out. Many would have thought the new Kepler architecture would have the same issues, but Nvidia learned from their mistake. Whats to stop AMD from doing the same?

 

[Mousemonkey]

Why is everyone so surprised of course AMD's flagship will beat the GTX 780 and Titan, the problem is pricing for Nvidia, how much will they drop the price of the Titan? Once Mantle is a reality how much farther will the performance gap be??

Seeing as Mantle is only implemented in one game so far, who cares?

 

[shin0bi272]

great numbers and thanks for the article. Looks like a great buy for those currently seeking a new card. Im good with my 670 for now but this is still cool.

 

[John Bauer]

@LePhuronn "Plus I bet you a fiver AMD's noise and power consumption will still be ridiculous compared to Nvidia's 700 series."

While in the past AMD cards have had serious power consumption and heat problems (7990), this is a new GPU architecture. Just like the old Fermi architecture that had really bad heat problems when Nvidias cards rolled out. Many would have thought the new Kepler architecture would have the same issues, but Nvidia learned from their mistake. Whats to stop AMD from doing the same?

No, it's still the Tahiti architecture...The 2xx series is just a rebrand, same as the 7xx series from Nvidia...

 

[sha7bot]

Wow. You're worse than my girlfriend, ya damned tease.

 

[smeezekitty]

I hate NDAs. They just make things hard for everyone

 

[Alen Kirm]

Shut up about nVidia. I want MORE BENCHMAKRS ! Do Battlefield 3 1080p PLEASE !

 

[cliffro]

No, it's still the Tahiti architecture...The 2xx series is just a rebrand, same as the 7xx series from Nvidia...

From R9-280x down they are rebrands, 290 & 290x are new.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Why is everyone so surprised of course AMD's flagship will beat the GTX 780 and Titan, the problem is pricing for Nvidia, how much will they drop the price of the Titan? Once Mantle is a reality how much farther will the performance gap be??

Seeing as Mantle is only implemented in one game so far, who cares?

He is talking about the future, you are talking about now. But, you already knew that.

"Once" and "If" are not the same but I guess didn't know that!

 

[nikoli707]

the titan ultra with full 2880 streams will be nvidias counter... other than that... looking forward to the sub $500 gtx770ti and r9-290 performance we will be getting

 

[TeddyShotgun]

@John Bauer "No, it's still the Tahiti architecture...The 2xx series is just a rebrand, same as the 7xx series from Nvidia..."

That's not entirely true. While the 280X and below cards are just rebrands, the 290 and 290X are based on a new architecture.