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Today AMD are releasing their “Hawaii” GPU, the Radeon R9 290 which is a cut-down version of last month’s R9 290X. Despite being slower than the R9 290X the vanilla 290 is still considerably faster than last generations Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and with a similar introductory price tag gamers are in for one hell of a treat...
Prior to the release of the Radeon R9 290X on October 24th last month Nvidia had the high-end market pretty well stitched up. Sitting high at the top of the food chain was Nvidia’s equivalent of an Extreme Edition processor, the $1000 GeForce GTX Titan. Then there was the more sensible GeForce GTX 780 which made the Titan somewhat redundant at $650. Finally the re-badged GTX 770 which was formally the GTX 680, but with some faster GDDR5 memory was priced at $400. In comparison AMD had the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition which did cost $450, but was later discounted on behalf of the fact that it was slower than the GTX 770. Alternatively there was also the dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, though that was somewhat of a pointless product as a pair of 7970’s were faster, cheaper and easier to cool.
With almost half a year going by Nvidia enjoyed running unopposed in the high-end market and then it arrived, the Radeon R9 290X. Arrive it did, with a jaw dropping price tag of just $550, the same price the 7970 made its debut at 2 years earlier. What was significant about this was the fact that the Radeon R9 290X was able to deliver GeForce GTX Titan like performance at half the price. That being the case, it seemed unlikely that Nvidia would sell anymore GTX Titan and GTX 780 cards, so price cuts were made. As of October 29th (5 days after the R9 290X was released) Nvidia slashed prices of the GeForce GTX 780 and GTX 770. The GTX 780 was reduced from $650 to just $500, a 23% saving and $50 less than the R9 290X, while the GTX 770 was dropped from $400 to $330, a welcomed 18% price drop. This changes things quite a bit, as the R9 290X is now 10% more expensive than the GTX 780 rather than 15% cheaper. The new $500 price tag for the GTX 780 isn’t surprising given we found on average the R9 290X was 10% faster. The upcoming GTX 780 Ti will naturally attempt to bridge that gap, though we don’t expect it to be quite as fast as the R9 290X, so that will be an interesting release indeed. However an equally interesting release is taking place today, the Radeon R9 290 (non-X version). This cut down version of the R9 290X features 9% fewer SPU’s and TAU’s with the same amount of ROP’s. What hasn’t been changed is the 5GHz GDDR5 memory using a 512-bit wide memory bus resulting in the same 320GB/s memory bandwidth. So on paper at least the R9 290 should be no slower than the GeForce GTX 780... |
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ProX |
Posted on: 11/05/2013 09:36 PM
Incredible value but like the 290X where are the board partner versions? |
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Bing |
Posted on: 11/06/2013 07:59 PM
Gigabyte please put your WindForce cooler on this card!!! |