And the day has come. AMD has lifhted the NDA for Radeon R9 290X, and a lot of reviews have popped up. Unfortunately for our green friends, AMD has got everyone by surprise and presented a GPU that offers similar performance to Nvidia’s Titan card for a significant lower price.
AMD Radeon R9 290X comes with 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Unites and 64 POPs. The card comes with a 1000Mhz Core Boost Clock and 5GHz of 4GB GDDR5 Vram. AMD Radeon R9 290X is based on GCN 1.1, features a 512-bit memory bus width, supports TrueAudio and will be priced around $549.
In terms of performance, AMD Radeon R9 290X rivals Nvidia’s Titan card, and in some occasions it even surpasses it (especially at 4K benchmarks).
The only downside of AMD Radeon R9 290X is that it consumes more power than a Titan card, and that it gets really, really hot. It’s pretty obvious that gamers will need to manually set their fan speed at 100% (in order to maintain temps lower than 94°C).
It will be also interesting to see how games will run via AMD’s Mantle API on this brand new GPU. Without Mantle, AMD Radeon R9 290X is able to rival Titan. With Mantle, will this new GPU be able to push constant 60fps at 4K in games like Battlefield 4? Now that would be something truly spectacular, so hopefully the red team will unveil some Mantle benchies next month.
The ball is now in Nvidia’s court. How will the green team respond to AMD’s offer?
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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