AMD's Radeon R9 290X Launched, Faster Than GeForce GTX 780 For Roughly $100 Less

MojoKid writes "AMD has launched their new top-end Radeon R9 290X graphics card today. The new flagship wasn't ready in time for AMD's recent October 8th launch of midrange product, but their top of the line model, based on the GPU codenamed Hawaii, is ready now. The R9 290 series GPU (Hawaii) is comprised of up to 44 compute units with a total of 2,816 IEEE-2008 compliant shaders. The GPU has four geometry processors (2x the Radeon HD 7970) and can output 64 pixels per clock. The Radeon R9 290X features 2816 Stream Processors and an engine clock of up to 1GHz. The card's 4GB of GDDR5 memory is accessed by the GPU via a wide 512-bit interface and the R290X requires a pair of supplemental PCIe power connectors—one 6-pin and one 8-pin. Save for some minimum frame rate and frame latency issues, the new Radeon R9 290X's performance is impressive overall. AMD still has some obvious driver tuning and optimization to do, but frame rates across the board were very good. And though it wasn't a clean sweep for the Radeon R9 290X versus NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 780 or GeForce GTX Titan cards, AMD's new GPU traded victories depending on the game or application being used, which is to say the cards performed similarly."

Deferred shading/lighting + sparse voxel DAGs

[Suiggy]

Mantle support, 4GB of VRAM, 512-bit memory bus for fast transfers... we're in heaven.

With that much VRAM, there should be enough for a rich geometry buffer and room to spare for a decent sized scene represented by a sparse voxel DAG. Ray-cast the voxel DAG into the geometry buffer, then do your polygonal rendering pass, followed by your deferred lighting passes, and final composition.

Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less

[etherelithic]

But NVIDIA's consumer oriented cards have very slow double precision processing, something like 1/16 the processing speed of single precision. And they even artifically hobbled the DP performance of the GTX 780, which is otherwise a slightly cut down Titan (i.e. big kepler). All of AMD's 79XX cards (and its rebranded brethren the 280X card), and the new 290X card have 1/4 DP performance. I've consistently bought AMD Radeon cards for my OpenCL applications because their $300 cards are almost as fast as NVIDIA's $1000 card, and in some cases faster, for DP calculations.

Re:Faster than the nVidia GTX TITAN for $400 less

[JDG1980]

The GTX Titan is a double-precision computing card that happens to do very well at gaming. It's not really a fair comparison. Ever since the GTX 780 was released, pretty much every review site has recommended it over the Titan for gamers on price/performance grounds.