Radeon R9 290X Pictured, Tested, Beats NV Titan

[Ci7]

Here are the first pictures of AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. If the naming caught you off-guard, our older article on AMD's new nomenclature could help. Pictured below is the AMD reference-design board of the R9 290X. It's big, and doesn't have too much going on with its design. At least it doesn't look Fisher Price like its predecessor. This reference design card is all that you'll be able to buy initially, and non-reference design cards could launch much later.

With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.

 

 

 

 

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via techpowerup

 

[AngelGraves13]

YES!

 

Competition is back....

 

go AMD!

[WolfSilverLone]

not sure about other peoples experience but having multi ati/radeon cards ether single cards or in some cases 3-way crossfire. The amd/redeon drives are more or less garbage on windows and non existent in linux.

 

I can't count how many times the graphic drives stop responding due to ati drivers

 

[Ci7]

not sure about other peoples experience but having multi ati/radeon cards ether single cards or in some cases 3-way crossfire. The amd/redeon drives are more or less garbage on windows and non existent in linux.

 

I can't count how many times the graphic drives stop responding due to ati drivers

 

 

what are you running?

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

not sure about other peoples experience but having multi ati/radeon cards ether single cards or in some cases 3-way crossfire. The amd/redeon drives are more or less garbage on windows and non existent in linux.

 

I can't count how many times the graphic drives stop responding due to ati drivers

 

What year are you living in? AMD has far better linux drivers than Intel or Nvidia, secondly I don't know what you are doing but not once have my drives crashed or stopped responding since the 6xxx series..

[Elliot B.]

not sure about other peoples experience but having multi ati/radeon cards ether single cards or in some cases 3-way crossfire. The amd/redeon drives are more or less garbage on windows and non existent in linux.

I can't count how many times the graphic drives stop responding due to ati drivers

You're think of 2004.

[AngelGraves13]

Probably not enough power from your power supply.

 

I'd recommend at least 800 watts for 2 cards. I have a 1200 watt power supply and I have one card. System runs more stable when you aren't running at 80% load on your power supply. 50% load runs the best and lasts the longest, so go double what you need.

[Karl L.]

What year are you living in? AMD has far better linux drivers than Intel or Nvidia, secondly I don't know what you are doing but not once have my drives crashed or stopped responding since the 6xxx series..

 

As much as I like AMD's graphics cards I have to disagree with you about their Linux graphics drivers. It is fair to say that AMD has graphics drivers for Linux. It is a stretch to say that their open-source graphics driver is better than the open-source Intel driver. It is completely laughable to say that their proprietary graphics driver is better than the open-source Intel driver or proprietary NVIDIA driver.

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

That's your opinion and you're well entitled to it. I'm just saying what I've seen from my own experiences. I've only used 2 types of cards on unix, 560ti and 6790 and for me the AMD drivers seemed better and easier to mess around with for a unix "newbie".

[WolfSilverLone]

Probably not enough power from your power supply.

 

I'd recommend at least 800 watts for 2 cards. I have a 1200 watt power supply and I have one card. System runs more stable when you aren't running at 80% load on your power supply. 50% load runs the best and lasts the longest, so go double what you need.

last setup I had was 900Watt 3-way 5770 ...

ran it on vista sp2 x64 and windows 7  w/ sp1 x64.. In fact I still have 1 of my 5770 still running to this date on a amd black edition 965 3.4, 8gig ddr2 800mhz windows 7 sp1 x64

 

dosen't crash as much as it use to ? possible due to the fact its not CF at the moment  but comparable cards for its time the 260GTX was a better by

the computer its in, the user don't play any games ether.

 

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

Ooh. You're talking about crossfire. Then I have to admit, anything up to 13.2 sucked. Don't know from there forward.

[WolfSilverLone]

the other ati cards I had were x700 128mb AGP 4/8x and a old 9250 64mb pci

 

needless to say I so far enjoyed my 3DFX boards and nvidia boards more...

I jump off the bang wagon when the 2-way 7770  didn't work for unknown reason and picked up a 560ti448 core (basically 570gtx) for $1 more then the 2 7770 costed me originally

 

later found out I got a lot better bang for my buck by buying the slightly dated 1 card compared to the 2 new cards
 

I told my self I'll try and hold out till the 860ti/870 comes out before I replace my 560ti448

 

[R1pper]

i love AMD, wish them all the best, and hope AMD will grow in sales.

 

 

it's a great piece of hardware, only problem is: would it require to sell a kidney to own it?

[George P Global Moderator]

I'm not crazy about running my PC games at max everything, if my gfx card can do it then fine but if I have to go in and tweak some things to help performance that's also fine IMO.   I'm going to stick with my HD 7870 for as long as I can at this point.

[FloatingFatMan]

what are you running?

 

At a guess, I'd say at least 2 ounces of weed...

[psionicinversion]

thats obviosuly not the the newest ati card then seeing as the new ones arent unveiled yet and run on a 20nm process. hope therell be some 7950 equivalent card from them before bf 4 releases. Also talk of 11.2 is moot seeing as it just needs a driver update to enable it, cus the 7xxx series can do the tiled rendering with a driver update

[Ci7]

thats obviosuly not the the newest ati card then seeing as the new ones arent unveiled yet and run on a 20nm process. hope therell be some 7950 equivalent card from them before bf 4 releases. Also talk of 11.2 is moot seeing as it just needs a driver update to enable it, cus the 7xxx series can do the tiled rendering with a driver update

 

20nm would be ready around middle of 2014

 

would eat my word if otherwise

[AngelGraves13]

SLI isn't exactly a picnic either...

[psionicinversion]

20nm would be ready around middle of 2014

 

would eat my word if otherwise

 

thats what the new volcanic islands gpus are supposed to be manufactured on

[Astra.Xtreme]

SLI isn't exactly a picnic either...

I've never had any issues with SLI.  Had GTX 460s in SLI at one point, and then GTX 570s after that.

They were power-hungry, but damn they were powerful.  The 570s handled BF3 maxed out like a boss.

I'll probably throw in another GTX 680 when BF4 comes out.

[Scorpian8867]

thats what the new volcanic islands gpus are supposed to be manufactured on

 

Volcanic Islands will be 28nm. This was confirmed in an interview not too long ago. It's believed that Pirate Islands will be 20nm, but that's all just speculation right now. Do keep in mind that a die shrink is not guaranteed to be better all around. We definitely want to give them time to do it properly.

 

Also, AMD's crossfire drivers have come a long way over the years. Actually, their drivers in general have come a long way. The classic argument that nVidia is always ahead in the driver department really doesn't hold anywhere near as much water as it used to.

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

What year are you living in? AMD has far better linux drivers than Intel or Nvidia, secondly I don't know what you are doing but not once have my drives crashed or stopped responding since the 6xxx series..

I haven't used used Nvidia's drivers for a few years now (last Nvidia graphics card was a 9800GTX in 2009/2010), but ATI's drivers are fairly diabolical in my experience. Functionally they work (on Windows), but they're absolutely bloated. There's all kinds of crap pre-selected in the installer, and it re-asks you to install it with every damn update. It's like the graphics card equivalent of the bloatware that get's preloaded on a Toshiba laptop. Hell for me even the driver interface doesn't render right.

Don't even get me started on the Linux driver though. It's god knows how big, it never works with anything other than the Xorg-server packages that ships with Ubuntu, their multi-monitor setup is a PITA, their elevated control panel doesn't work on anything other than Gnome or KDE, running multiple monitors kills performance in games, stuttering everywhere, the list goes on, and on, and on. The only reason I even have it installed is because the 3D performance is marginally better than the open source driver.

I really don't want to stick with ATI for my next graphics upgrade, but depending on how good the performance of the next ATI graphics cards is, I may have to bite the bullet.

[Karl L.]

I haven't used used Nvidia's drivers for a few years now (last Nvidia graphics card was a 9800GTX in 2009/2010), but ATI's drivers are fairly diabolical in my experience. Functionally they work (on Windows), but they're absolutely bloated. There's all kinds of crap pre-selected in the installer, and it re-asks you to install it with every damn update. It's like the graphics card equivalent of the bloatware that get's preloaded on a Toshiba laptop. Hell for me even the driver interface doesn't render right.

Don't even get me started on the Linux driver though. It's god knows how big, it never works with anything other than the Xorg-server packages that ships with Ubuntu, their multi-monitor setup is a PITA, their elevated control panel doesn't work on anything other than Gnome or KDE, running multiple monitors kills performance in games, stuttering everywhere, the list goes on, and on, and on. The only reason I even have it installed is because the 3D performance is marginally better than the open source driver.

I really don't want to stick with ATI for my next graphics upgrade, but depending on how good the performance of the next ATI graphics cards is, I may have to bite the bullet.

Hats off to you, sir. Not only is your description of the situation spot-on, but it seriously. MADE. MY. DAY. You can ask my coworkers. I pierced the silence with laughter from my desk in the far corner of the room when I read the word "diabolical", and I couldn't stop laughing until 3 or 4 minutes after I finished reading your post. That felt good.

[game_over]

I'm not crazy about running my PC games at max everything, if my gfx card can do it then fine but if I have to go in and tweak some things to help performance that's also fine IMO.   I'm going to stick with my HD 7870 for as long as I can at this point.

 

What games do we need to push a GPU to the limit, i've only recently started PC gaming i've got a Radeon HD 7750, all games i've played run on max and performance is great, i'm blown away by the graphics compared to my XBOX.. not sure whats left to gain personally by going for a better GPU.

[spudtrooper]

Been running ATI 7xxx cards for a while now and i have zero complaints about drivers. They in fact did get more stable when they went to quarterly releases instead of the non stop deluge they used to.

 

In fact, i'm more upset at Intel drivers lately.. they still don't have Windows 8.1 drivers for the HD3000 and the ones including in 8.1 rtm are pure rubbish