AMD's Radeon R9 290 Delivers 290X Performance For $150 Less 183
crookedvulture writes "The back and forth battle for PC graphics supremacy is quite a thing to behold. Last week, Nvidia cut GeForce prices in response to the arrival of AMD's latest Radeons. That move caused AMD to rejigger its plans for the new Radeon R9 290, which debuted today with a higher default fan speed and faster performance than originally planned. This $400 card offers almost identical performance to AMD's flagship R9 290X for $150 less. Indeed, it's often faster than Nvidia's $1000 GeForce Titan. But the 290 also consumes a lot more power, and its fan spins up to 49 decibels under load. Fortunately, the acoustic profile isn't too grating. Radeon R9 290 isn't the only new graphics card due this week, either. Nvidia is scheduled to unveil its GeForce GTX 780 Ti on November 7, and that card could further upset the balance at the high end of the GPU market. As AMD and Nvidia trade blows, PC gamers seem to be the ones who benefit."
Additional reviews available from AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware.
290X (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anandtech Fucked Up (Score:2, Informative)
It's probably more to do with taking measurements at a 12 inch distance rather than something reasonable or even standard like 3 feet. While they're not perfect, I find that that techpower up [techpowerup.com] has the best measurements regarding noise and the largest sample size of different cards.
Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia (Score:5, Informative)
But again, for gaming, it's entirely unnecessary. Heck, it's extremely likely that the 780Ti, which should be revealed in a few days, will basically be a Titan with higher clocks, slower double-precision operations (whereas the 780 has a few cores less) and less VRAM.
Re:Are PC gamers benefiting ? (Score:5, Informative)
From a marketplace that used to be served by 6 competing vendors into a duopoly marketplace that is currently served by only 2 vendors --- the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl.
We're most definitely not in a duopoly marketplace at the moment. There are currently only 2 companies offering high performance 3D consumer priced cards, but there are other companies in the graphics business. The most popular graphics card used by people using Steam is the Intel HD Graphics 3000 [steampowered.com], for example. Matrox is still about, too, but not competing in consumer 3D.
To be honest, I can't really remember a time in which there were more than 3 (possibly 4) major players in the high end consumer 3D market. Matrox dabbled, but never got close to a cost efficient gaming card, really IMO... the closest they came was the G400 IIRC. That was the era when you could possibly claim there were 4 competing vendors. Soon after, Matrox left the market to concentrate on 2D, and 3dfx dissapeared up their own arse. I'm not sure who the other 2 you are alluding to are.... SiS, VIA?
Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia (Score:5, Informative)
The Titan isn't positioned as a high-end gaming card as much as it is a low-end scientific computing card. It's the cheapest GPU that has reasonable double-precision floating-point performance. For whatever reason, most Kepler cards run DP operations at 1/24th the speed of single-precision, but the Titan and most of the Tesla cards are able to do so at 1/3rd the speed. There, the Titan runs thousands less than the similar Tesla cards (the K20 is listed on Newegg for $3500, and the K20X is on Amazon for $7700).
The fact that the Titan also gets some buys from gamers with way too much money is just a side bonus. Even since the 780 came out, it's been extremely wasteful to get a Titan for gaming. And Nvidia's own 780 Ti is likely to out-perform the Titan in games for $300 less. Really, I think the only reason they ever marked it as a gaming card was as a publicity stunt - they held the title of "fastest card ever" for quite a while, and they held it by an impressive lead.
Re:um (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're underestimating how much GPU power games need these days. I bought a Dell 30" monitor 5 years ago, which I'm still using for gaming. The native resolution is 2560x1600, so not even close to the new 4K ones. At this resolution, my old 3 years old Radeon 5870 was struggling to get smooth framerates for several games. So I bought the new GTX 780 when it came out for $600. The new card is fantastic, I can finally play The Witcher 2 at full resolution with high settings, same with Bioshock Infinite, etc. Keep in mind, the new 4K resolutions will demand even more out of GPUs, so it's not likely that the demand will go down all that much yet.
Sure, if you're a gamer who fires up a 1080p console port once in a while, a cheap GPU will do. If you're an avid gamer who needs more than 1080p, you still need to buy the $400+ cards to keep up.