AMD's Radeon R9 290X Review 212
Billly Gates writes "AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is doing well. AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1,000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target"
ATI drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ATI drivers (Score:5, Informative)
148MB for the latest Nvidia driver.
Don't use AMD's control panel (Score:4, Informative)
The drivers do NOT need .Net, or 90Mb. The extremely crappy control panel, which has NOTHING to do with the drivers, uses the dreadful .Net API, and thusly needs loads of HDD space. People in-the-know install third-party front-ends like 'Tray Tools' or the like.
Sadly, ATI loves to take significant pay-offs from companies like MS, acting if THEY are the customer, not the person who purchased the graphics card. This, we can truly describe as ATI/AMD endlessly shooting themselves in the foot. Using .Net for the official control panel was a disgusting and despicable act, and was a great example of the contempt the older version of ATI had for its users.
AMD/ATI is a much better company today- it was either improve or die, and after the longest possible time, AMD finally made the right choice. However, we get glimpses of the bad old ATI with issues like the fiasco over the recent release of 'new' GPU cards that are almost all just re-brands of older cards, with the free games removed (AND higher prices). This kick-in-the-teeth for customers was done simply so AMD can make a song and dance about free games with all their cards AFTER they finish releasing the new 290 family (the 290X is just the first of three 290 cards- the 'free' games won't be announced until after AMD launches all of them).
In truth, ATI/AMD customers need to be smarter than customers of Nvidia products. Nvidia prides itself on cards that 'just work'. With AMD, you frequently need to know what you are doing, at which point AMD rivals Nvidia- but 'out of the box' the AMD experience is usually worse. Nvidia supports its older graphics cards MUCH better than AMD, but older graphics cards from AMD tend to get faster with time as newer games exploit the more forward looking architecture of ATI designs.
People have more problems with ATI cards in games, but this happens because uncommon settings in ATI's control panel (like the number of frames being rendered ahead) can cause terrible game problems if not adjusted per game on the desktop. Again, informed ATI owners KNOW which settings to tweak, but for the average user, the ATI experience can be frustrating. This is entirely ATI's fault, because a PC game, with a tiny amount of code, can programmatically set the correct options, but many game developers do not know how to do this. Nvidia does a much better job helping developers set-up their game code correctly for all usable generations of Nvidia graphics cards.
ATI has a nasty habit, as well, of disowning very recent cards that, on paper, had the features to support current games. ATI likes its shills to say ('jeez, your 4 year old card is out-of-date junk') whereas Nvidia happily ensures every generation of its cards that support DX9 work as well as their hardware allows. In reality, ATI cards from the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series are effectively the same as everything up to the 6000 series (excluding the orphan architecture of the 6900 VLIW4 oddities). However, ATI pays technical sites to state the cards from the 5000 series and earlier are obsolete (technically this is completely untrue). In contrast, Nvidia is proud to support cards from the 8000 series and onwards, which is a similar timeframe to the 2000 series from ATI.
While it is true that 'cheap' current gen cards destroy premium cards from that far back, it is the principle that matters.
rich people problems (Score:4, Informative)
"only" 550 dollars. Most people spend less than that on a whole computer, or don't HAVE 550 dollars.
Re:AMD - Can't help but be a fan.. (Score:4, Informative)
Partly, but they never could match Intel on process technology which meant Intel always had a cost advantage, even when their CPU designs were inferior. As for more recent events, AMD looks saved for a while as the division that includes consoles more than doubled last quarter and gave them an overall profit so at least for the next year or so with big console sales they should be good. Still, with all their diversifying I'm worried that they simply don't want to step back into the ring with Intel, but instead focus on graphics cards, graphics-heavy APUs, heterogenous computing, semicustom designs, ARM micrservers and so on.
The reason I say that is because their CPU sales are way down, still going down and losing money - they have to either really step it up or step out and their roadmaps don't exactly indicate going on the offensive, just moderate revisions that might keep them from losing more ground. They have CPUs good enough to be "console-quality" for this generation of consoles, that'll sell for a good while since many PC games will be console ports and so play well on that level of hardware even if they give up competing with future Intel CPUs. It's not like they're competing very well on high-performance or performance per watt today, jjust performance per dollar and it's showing on AMDs financials.
Re:ATI drivers (Score:2, Informative)
For Nvidia drivers, don't forget to remove the 2 "AppInit_DLLs => nvinitx.dll" entries inside the registry. Preloading this DLL inserts nasty hooks for optimus's support. I that kind of tricks.
Also remove the "updatus" user and its account/files.
In the services, after the parameters of the card are configured as desired inside the control panel, you should turn off permanently the nvidia 3D profiles updating service and the driver's support service.
Once this is done the computer is more stable, less bloated and less prone to be impacted by vulnerabilities inside the NVidia driver.
And optimus doesn't just randomly cause BSOD when pluging in/off hdmi cables anymore.
Finally rootkit detection softwares like Gmer don't report weird stuff anymore.
Go home Nvidia, your drivers suck and you should be ashamed.
No 90MB for ALL drivers (Score:5, Informative)
I installed fresh ATI graphics drivers today. 90MB for a driver. .Net 4.5 needed to be installed. GTFO.
You didn't download a 90MB driver. You downloaded a 90MB package which includes all drivers for all versions of windows, for all architectures, for all ATI cards, and it came with a utility that automatically installs the correct thing for your situation.
I wish more companies did this. Take the guess work out of the download screen. NVIDIA does it too.
Also what's wrong with .NET 4.5? Do you regularly judge applications solely by the framework their developers chose?
Re:No 90MB for ALL drivers (Score:3, Informative)
> Also what's wrong with .NET 4.5?
It's slow... so slow to open what is basically a dialog box.
Also, it's not cross platform - so they can't use it for Mac and Linux.
Re:Maybe I'm just a lame "PC gamer"... (Score:5, Informative)
This stuff is just amazing to me. The bottom end R7 260x card clocks 1.97 TFLOPS for $139. For that $550 you get up to 5.6 TFLOPS. It wasn't so long ago you would expect to pay $2,000 for a desktop PC. In fact, you still can.
In June 1997 ASCI Red at Sandia Labs was the first supercomputer in the TOP500 to breach the 1TFLOPS barrier. It had 7,264 cores in 104 cabinets or system racks consuming a total of 1600 square feet of datacenter space. It required 850 KW of power, not including cooling. With upgrades it remained at the #1 spot on the supercomputer charts until 2000, and wasn't decomissioned until early 2006 when it remained in the TOP500 list as #276 with only 2.4 TFLOPS.
Re:No 90MB for ALL drivers (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing about drivers is cross platform. I highly doubt that even made it into a list of considerations.
As for .NET being slow, yes it's slow for the end user. But how often do you use it? I don't think I've opened the NVIDIA control panel since I installed windows a year ago. You know what .NET is fast at? Developing. Your complicated dialogue box you likely never use was also likely very quick to throw together.
AMD (Score:1, Informative)