Images, Benchmarks and Specifications of AMD's R9-290X Surface

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Too bad that AvP is a AMD gaming evolved title and known to perform better on AMD GPUs.

That said it is interesting how these benchmarks show it pulling ahead more with AA enabled than without AA enabled. That's a good sign.

Again we must take these with a grain of salt but the PCB design looks just like a standard Sapphire designed card so it might be real.
 
It'll be interesting to see where things go with the new cards. The Titan card is a interesting card where its part gaming card part production card. So I'd say if this card is a full gaming card that it may be a bit of a unfair comparison and I'd be more interested in the normal retail cards. That fall in line with the 7970 7950 style rather then the $1k cards or the Dual GPU cards.
 

beta212

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Let the price wars begin!!

But more seriously...We must keep an open mind, IF these benchmarks are true, coupled with a lower price, more ram, more bandwidth, better opencl performance, better overclockability (if the 7xxx is any indication), the Nvidia 780 and the Titian are effectively crippled.
More benchmarks: View this thread in the forums for the pics, the reply system hates picutures.
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I remember hearing that when the 680 originally came out that it was org supposed to be the 660Ti. And the 780 is just a lowered down version of the Titan. So I get what you are saying but I have a feeling that AMD/Nvidia both do the holding out game waiting to see what the other person does then one upping them all the time.

THIS is what the CPU wars should be. I mean we can be fan boys over each brand but thsi is what we want form AMD/INTEL.
 

CaptainTom

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In all honesty this card will make Titan/780 owners feel silly supporting what was CLEARLY price gouging by Nvidia. But then again, it should have been obvious from the get go considering an overclocked HD 7970 meets the 780 at half the cost...
 

kirilmatthew

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Statements in a Forbes interview by AMD says that they will not price any single GPU near $1000 and all rumors point towards the 290x at $600 or less, $50 or more cheaper then the 780.
 

InvalidError

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There is no price war nor will there be any on the CPU side any time soon since very little mainstream software can make use of the processing power already available. Until enough mainstream applications start requiring quad-cores to threaten Intel's market share, I would not expect a major market shift for another 5-10 years.

Another possibility is that applications and games with embarrassingly parallel computations will simply shove those onto OpenCL and not really care how fast (or slow) the CPU actually is as long as there are sufficient OpenCL resources available.
 


I'm just saying that the cpu market right now is very stagnant and a lot of that is because intel doesn't really have anyone to push them.
All I was really saying was that with amd and nvidia really pushing each other it would be nice if AMD had the same ability with their CPU line since they are the only other desktop CPU out.

Time will tell with GPU's exciting to see the advancement with things. Although one has to ask themselves outside a game like star citizen what do we really need the extra power for at the current moment. Any high end AMD chip now or Nvidia chip now can pretty much do w.e it wants with the games that are out now with rare exceptions 3d/4k/and multi screens.
 


The difference is that AMD does not cripple their gaming cards from being able to run production apps.

While the FireGLs are designed with production in mind (top of the crop silicon much like server CPUs), a HD7970 eats a Titan up in OpenCL (hence why AMD is so popular with the various Coin mining types which heavily use Open CL) since NVidia makes their gaming GPUs do pretty poor in OpenCL. NVidia wants you to spend a few $K on their Quadros instead.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-opencl-cuda-workstation,3474-19.html

I don't see why AMD will change that now unless they get greedy.
 




But you still run into things that are either opencl or cuda favored or this game is favored by this amd card or this nvidia card there isn't a constant.

Look at how things turned out with tomb raider with nvidia cards. upon release the cards had a hard time same could be said for amd cards with metro last light light its not a clear yes or no answer.

Although going back to production work I think you would need to find a production environment where both cuda and opencl could be tested to really give it a go.

Also, saying OpenCL is poorly ran on nvidia cards is really a mute point thats like saying Physx is poorly ran on AMD cards. Both companies utilize different tech. It's fair when you can take a apples to apples comparison Havok versus Physx versus CUDA versus OPEN CL in a application or game that uses it.
 

BigMack70

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Nvidia has come across as pretty arrogant in their releases over the past 18 months... I really hope that AMD can lay the smack down on them with this release. We need more competition at the top end.

Hopefully AMD fixes their various driver woes with this launch, as well. If they ever get their software support as good as Nvidia's, consumers will really win big time.
 


And this wasn't arrogant of AMD? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH6XayaLTw8

Companies only push the envelop when they feel the pressure. AMD needs to push the envelop to survive due to financial reasons. Nvidia has never felt the pressure money wise so they react to the product rather then their internal pressure.
 

BigMack70

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I am not referring to the marketing, which is expected to present its side in the most one sided way possible, from either company. That's not arrogance, that's their job.

I am referring primarily to:
-Nvidia releasing and pricing GK104 as if it were a high end card
-Nvidia releasing GK110 absurdly late and launching it with the laughable price of $1000 (Titan)
 
... "Nvidia price gouging" along with clever marketing gimmicks, Nvidia never felt the sting of financial troubles, while AMD looks out for the consumer with more realistic pricing, and offers atypical of most companies just to stay afloat in the graphics fad known as Nvidia?
 

tomfreak

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I Switched to AMD already(previously I am all-Nvidia user), because Nvidia thinks I am a ATM machine by charging $1000 on TITAN, luckily i never fall into that trick. GCN is also the future with console are GCN optimized.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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The biggest problem for CPUs is the lack of mainstream software that actually needs more processing power than is already available from both AMD and Intel. Right now, the only things that require that much processing power are professional-oriented suites and the highest-end games that cater mostly to twitch-gamers.

Without CPU-intensive mainstream applications to make most people wish they had faster CPUs the same way we did 10 years ago when we still had to wait for word processors to complete page formatting changes or spreadsheets to re-calculate after updating cells, there is little low/mid-range market demand to justify increasing processing power offer in those segments at the expense of more profitable higher-end segments.

If a mainstream killer app that cannot be OpenCL'd and requires the equivalent of an i7-4770 or FX-8350 to be somewhat usable comes out, things might shuffle quickly to accommodate that. But at this point in time, I cannot imagine anything that would require that much processing power while being a nearly universal must-have like h264 is - with nearly everyone using Youtube, Netflix and other video streaming services on a regular basis, most people wouldn't put up with a computer or tablet that lacks sufficient processing power to handle h264 for long. h265 and 4k might be the next biggest mainstream processing time sink on the horizon but by the time they become mainstream, most IGPs will decode that in hardware and make it a non-issue.

So, personally, I blame software for the stagnation between AMD and Intel: without CPU-intensive mainstream software to force average users to demand or desire faster CPUs, most of them will settle low-end CPUs that are already more than enough for most of their other everyday tasks and the gap between low-end and high-end will only continue to grow wider both on prices and performance: price pressure at the low-end and price inflation at the high-end due to marginalization and hollowing out of the mid-range segments.

If you want a "CPU war," first you need to create demand for such processing power.
 


Why do people think this? I am all for consoles finally moving to PC hardware but there are still factors that will limit the optimizations of the consoles moving over to the PC.

One will be the software. The PS4 is going to have proprietary software and probably will mainly use OpenGL. That means the majority of optimizations, unless most devs go OpenGL, will be very limited. The XB1 will use the Windows 8 kernel and will be DX11 but still wont quite be Windows.

Second is the hardware. While it is PC based (x86/DX11/OGL4.2+ etc) it is still designed for just those consoles. That means that unless you have a configuration just like them, which is impossible since they have their own set of hardware and drivers that wont be released to the public (such as the EDRAM on the XB1) it still will require further optimizations.

What it really means is that it will be easier for devs to develop titles and release them without the need to port so much. Its kinda funny as most every game is developed on the PC and ported to console then ported back to PC if it comes to PC.

As I said, this should make that easier but since there is Intel/AMD/NVidia the combination of hardware will make it neigh impossible to optimize for. Intel has the CPU performance and its a back and forth between AMD/NVidia with NVidia being top right now and possibly AMD soon.

I just want my HD7970 to feel some pressure from some games soon. Its capable of such amazing feats but help back by current gen consoles.
 

kinggremlin

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In all honesty this card will make Titan/780 owners feel silly supporting what was CLEARLY price gouging by Nvidia. But then again, it should have been obvious from the get go considering an overclocked HD 7970 meets the 780 at half the cost...

In all honesty. You're probably wrong. Titan will have been out for about 8 months if these AMD cards are released in a month. There is always going to be something faster in development around the corner. Anyone dropping $1000 on a video isn't shopping for bargains and has been enjoying the best of the best for half a year.

As for the 2nd part. It baffles me how often the idiotic comparison in the format of, product "x" overclocked to the limit is just as fast as product "y" running at stock speeds, so why would any moron buy product "y", is made. Unless product "y" is clock locked, which is an extremely rare occurrence in these comparisons, then it is a meaningless comparison.

I own a 7970GE card and it will not compete with an OC'd GTX 780. The 780 has a significant advantage in efficiency, and when comparing multi-GPU setups it turns into a laugher for the 780/Titan setup. I saved quite a bit of money going with the 7970, but I'm not blind to the fact that the Nvidia cards that cost more are superior in almost all aspects except cost.
 
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