The AMD Radeon R9 290X Review
by Ryan Smith on October 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
Final Words
Bringing this review to a close, going into this launch AMD has been especially excited about the 290X and it’s easy to see why. Traditionally AMD has not been able to compete with NVIDIA’s big flagship GPUs, and while that hasn’t stopped AMD from creating a comfortable spot for themselves, it does mean that NVIDIA gets left to their own devices. As such while the sub-$500 market has been heavily competitive this entire generation, the same could not be said about the market over $500 until now. And although a niche of a niche in terms of volume, this market segment is where the most powerful of video cards reside, so fierce competition here not only brings down the price of these flagship cards sooner, but in the process it inevitably pushes prices down across the board. So seeing AMD performance competitive with GTX Titan and GTX 780 with their own single-GPU card is absolutely a breath of fresh air.
Getting down to business then, AMD has clearly positioned the 290X as a price/performance monster, and while that’s not the be all and end all of evaluating video cards it’s certainly going to be the biggest factor to most buyers. To that end at 2560x1440 – what I expect will be the most common resolution used with such a card for the time being – AMD is essentially tied with GTX Titan, delivering an average of 99% of the performance of NVIDIA’s prosumer-level flagship. Against NVIDIA’s cheaper and more gaming oriented GTX 780 that becomes an outright lead, with the 290X leading by an average of 9% and never falling behind the GTX 780.
Consequently against NVIDIA’s pricing structure the 290X is by every definition a steal at $549. Even if it were merely equal to the GTX 780 it would still be $100 cheaper, but instead it’s both faster and cheaper, something that has proven time and again to be a winning combination in this industry. Elsewhere the fact that it can even tie GTX Titan is mostly icing on the cake – for traditional gamers Titan hasn’t made a lot of sense since GTX 780 came out – but nevertheless it’s an important milestone for AMD since it’s a degree of parity they haven’t achieved in years.
But with that said, although the 290X has a clear grip on performance and price it does come at the cost of power and cooling. With GTX Titan and GTX 780 NVIDIA set the bar for power efficiency and cooling performance on a high-end card, and while it’s not necessarily something that’s out of AMD’s reach it’s the kind of thing that’s only sustainable with high video card prices, which is not where AMD has decided to take the 290X. By focusing on high performance AMD has had to push quite a bit of power through 290X, and by focusing on price they had to do so without blowing their budget on cooling. The end result is that the 290X is more power hungry than any comparable high-end card, and while AMD is able to effectively dissipate that much heat the resulting cooling performance (as measured by noise) is at best mediocre. It’s not so loud as to be intolerable for a single-GPU setup, but it’s as loud as can be called reasonable, never mind preferable.
On that note, while this specific cooler implementation leaves room for improvement the underlying technology has turned out rather well thanks to AMD’s PowerTune improvements. Now that AMD has fine grained control over GPU clockspeeds and voltages and the necessary hardware to monitor and control the full spectrum of power/temp/noise, it opens up the door to more meaningful ways of adjusting the card and monitoring its status. Admittedly a lot of this is a retread of ground NVIDIA already covered with GPU Boost 2, but AMD’s idea for fan throttling is in particular a more intuitive method of controlling GPU noise than trying to operate by proxy via temperature and/or power.
Meanwhile 290X Crossfire performance also ended up being a much welcomed surprise thanks in large part to AMD’s XDMA engine. The idea of exclusively using the PCI-Express bus for inter-GPU communication on a high-end video card was worrying at first given the inherent latency that comes PCIe, but to the credit of AMD’s engineers they have shown that it can work and that it works well. AMD is finally in a position where their multi-GPU frame pacing is up to snuff in all scenarios, and while there’s still some room for improvement in further reducing overall variance we’re to the point where everything up to and including 4K is working well. AMD still faces a reckoning next month when they attempt to resolve their frame pacing issues on their existing products, but at the very least going forward AMD has the hardware and the tools they need to keep the issue under control. Plus this gets rid of Crossfire bridges, which is a small but welcome improvement.
Wrapping things up, it’s looking like neither NVIDIA nor AMD are going to let today’s launch set a new status quo. NVIDIA for their part has already announced a GTX 780 Ti for next month, and while we can only speculate on performance we certainly don’t expect NVIDIA to let the 290X go unchallenged. The bigger question is whether they’re willing to compete with AMD on price.
GTX Titan and its prosumer status aside, even with NVIDIA’s upcoming game bundle it’s very hard right now to justify GTX 780 over the cheaper 290X, except on acoustic grounds. For some buyers that will be enough, but for 9% more performance and $100 less there are certainly buyers who are going to shift their gaze over to the 290X. For those buyers NVIDIA can’t afford to be both slower and more expensive than 290X. Unless NVIDIA does something totally off the wall like discontinuing GTX 780 entirely, then they have to bring prices down in response to the launch of 290X. 290X is simply too disruptive to GTX 780, and even GTX 770 is going to feel the pinch between that and 280X. Bundles will help, but what NVIDIA really needs to compete with the Radeon 200 series is a simple price cut.
Meanwhile AMD for their part would appear to have one more piece to play. Today we’ve seen the Big Kahuna, but retailers are already listing the R9 290, which based on AMD’s new naming scheme would be AMD’s lower tier Hawaii card. How that will pan out remains to be seen, but as a product clearly intended to fill in the $250 gap between 290X and 280X while also making Hawaii a bit more affordable, we certainly have high expectations for its performance. And if nothing else we’d certainly expect it to further ratchet up the pressure on NVIDIA.
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TheJian - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link
LOL. Tell that to both their bottom lines. I see AMD making nothing while NV profits. People who bought titan got a $2500 Tesla for $1000. You don't buy a titan just to game (pretty dumb if you did) as it's for pro apps too (the compute part of the deal). It's a steal for gamers who make money on the card too. Saving $1500 is a great deal. So since you're hating on NV pricing, how do you feel about the 7990 at $1000. Nice to leave that out of your comment fanboy ;) Will AMD now reap what they sow and have to deal with all the angry people who bought those? ROFL. Is the 1K business model unsustainable for AMD too? Even the 6990 came in at $700 a ways back. Dual or single chip the $1000 price is alive and well from either side for those who want it.I'd bet money a titan ultra will be $1000 again shortly if they even bother as it's not a pure gamer card but much more already. If you fire up pro apps with Cuda you'll smoke that 290x daily (which covers just about all pro apps). Let me know when AMD makes money in a quarter that NVDA loses money. Then you can say NV pricing is biting them in the A$$. Until then, your comment is ridiculous. Don't forget even as ryan points out in this article (and he don't love NV...LOL), AMD still has driver problems (and has for ages) but he believes in AMD much like fools do in Obama still...LOL. For me, even as an 5850 owner, they have to PROVE themselves before I ponder another card from them at 20nm. The 290x is hot, noisy and uses far more watts and currently isn't coming with 3 AAA games either. NV isn't shaking in their boots. I'll be shocked if 780TI isn't $600 or above as it should match Titan which 290x doesn't do even with the heat, noise and watts.
And you're correct no OC room. Nobody has hit above 1125.
If NV was greedy, wouldn't they be making MORE money than in 2007? They haven't cracked 850mil in 5 years. Meanwhile, AMD's pricing which you seem to love, has cause their entire business to basically fail (no land, no fabs, gave up cpu race, 8 months to catch up with a hot noisy chip etc). They have lost over $6B in the last 10yrs. AMD has idiots managing their company and they are destroying what used to be a GREAT company with GREAT products. They should have priced this card $100 higher and all other cards rebadged should be $50 higher. They might make some actual money then every quarter right? Single digit margins on console chips (probably until 20nm shrink) won't get you rich either. Who made that deal? FIRE THAT GUY. That margin is why NV said it wasn't worth it.
chizow - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
AMD's non-profitability goes far beyond their GPU business, it's more due to their CPU business. People who got Titan didn't get a Tesla for $1000, they got a Tesla without ECC. Compute apps without ECC would be like second-guessing every result because you're unsure whether a value was stored/retrieved from memory correctly. Regard to 7990 pricing, you can surely look it up before pulling the fanboy card, just as you can look up my comments on 7970 launch pricing. And yes, AMD will absolutely have to deal with that backlash giving that card dropped even more precipitously than even Titan, going from $1K to $600 in only 4-5 months.I don't think Nvidia will make the same mistake with a Titan Ultra at $1K. I also don't think Nvidia fans who only bought Titan for gaming will fall for the same mistake 2x. If Maxwell comes out and Nvidia holds out on the big ASIC, I doubt anyone disinterested in compute will fall for the same trick if Nvidia launches a Titan 2 at $1K using a compute gimmick to justify the price. They will just point to Titan and say "wait 3 months and they'll release something that's 95% of it's performance at 65% of it's price". As they say, Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
And no, greed and profit don't go hand in hand. In 2007-2008, Nvidia posted record profits and revenue for multiple consecutive quarters as you stated on the back of a cheap $230-$270 8800GT. With Titan, they reversed course by setting record margins, but on reduced revenue and profits. They basically covet Intel's huge profit margins, but they clearly lack the revenue to grow their bottomline. Selling $1K GPUs certainly isn't going to get them there any faster.
FragKrag - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
great performance, but I'll wait until I see some better thermals/noise from aftermarket coolers :pShark321 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
As with the Titan in the beginning, no alternate coolers will be available for the time being (according to computerbase). This means even if the price is great, you will be stuck with a very noisy and hot card. 780Ti will outperform the 290x in 3 weeks. It remains to bee seen how it will be priced (I guess $599).The Von Matrices - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
This is the next GTX 480 or HD 2900 XT. It provides great performance for the price, that is if you can put up with the heat and noise.KaosFaction - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Work in Progress!!! Whhhhaaaattttt I want answers now!!masterpine - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Good to see something from AMD challenging the GK110's, I still find it fairly remarkable that in the fast moving world of GPU's it's taken 12 months for AMD to build something to compete. Hopefully this puts a swift end to the above $600 prices in the single GPU high end.More than a little concerned at the 95C target temp of these things. 80C is toasty enough already for the GTX780, actually had to point a small fan at the DVI cables coming out the back of my 780 SLI surround setup because the heat coming out the back of them was causing dramas. Not sure i could cope with the noise of a 290X either.
Anyhow, this is great for consumers. Hope to see some aftermarket coolers reign these things in a bit. If the end result is both AMD and Nvidia playing hard-ball at the $500 mark in a few weeks time, we all win.
valkyrie743 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
HOLY TEMPS BATMAN. its the new gtx 480 in the temp's departmentkallogan - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
No overclocking headroom with stock cooler. That's for sure.FuriousPop - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
can we please see 2x in CF mode with eyefinity!? or am i asking for too much?also, Nvidia will always be better for those of you in the 30% department of having only max 1080p. for the rest of us in 1440p and 1600p and beyond (eyefinity) then AMD will be as stated by previous comments in this thread "King of the hill"....
but none the less, some more testing in the CF+3x monitor department would be great to see how far this puppy really goes...
i mean seriously whats the point of putting a 80 year old man behind the wheel of the worlds fastest car?!? please push the specs on gaming benchmarks pls (eg; higher res)