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
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
The first of the games AMD allowed us to publish results for, Bioshock is actually a straight up brawl between the 290X and the GTX 780 at 2560. The 290X’s performance advantage here is just 2%, much smaller than the earlier leads it enjoyed and essentially leaving the two cards tied, which also makes this one of the few games that 290X can’t match GTX Titan. At 2560 everything 290X/GTX 780 class or better can beat 60fps despite the heavy computational load of the depth of field effect, so for AMD 290X is the first single-GPU card from them that can pull this off.
Meanwhile at 4K things end up being rather split depending on the resolution we’re looking at. At Ultra quality the 290X and GTX 780 are again tied, but neither is above 30fps. Drop down to Medium quality however and we get framerates above 60fps again, while at the same time the 290X finally pulls away from the GTX 780, beating it by 14% and even edging out GTX Titan. Like so many games we’re looking at today the loss in quality cannot justify the higher resolution, in our opinion, but it presents another scenario where 290X demonstrates superior 4K performance.
For no-compromises 4K gaming we once again turn our gaze towards the 290X CF and GTX 780 SLI, which has AMD doing very well for themselves. While AMD and NVIDIA are nearly tied at the single GPU level – keep in mind we’re in uber mode for CF, so the uber 290X has a slight performance edge in single GPU mode – with multiple GPUs in play AMD sees better scaling from AFR and consequently better overall performance. At 95% the 290X achieves a nearly perfect scaling factor here, while the GTX 780 SLI achieves only 65%. Curiously this is better for AMD and worse for NVIDIA than the scaling factors we see at 2560, which are 86% and 72% respectively.
Moving on to our FCAT measurements, it’s interesting to see just how greatly improved the frame pacing is for the 290X versus the 280X, even with the frame pacing fixes in for the 280X. Whereas the 280X has deltas in excess of 21%, the 290X brings those deltas down to 10%, better than halving the variance in this game. Consequently the frame time consistency we’re seeing goes from being acceptable but measurably worse than NVIDIA’s consistency to essentially equal. In fact 10% is outright stunning for a multi-GPU setup, as we rarely achieve frame rates this consistent on those setups.
Finally for 4K gaming our variance increases a bit, but not immensely so. Despite the heavier rendering workload and greater demands on moving these large frames around, the delta percentages keep to 13%.
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Da W - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The reference cooler is noisy as hell, but it's a blower. At least it doesn't dump all the heat inside your case and let your other case fans handle it. It depends what you're looking for.Still make as much noise as the 5870 did, and it was a commercial success.
slickr - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Didn't think AMD will deliver, in fact I thought from seeing some initial benchmarks that AMD took over 6 months just to deliver a graphic card slower than Titan and that even with a cheap price it wouldn't be enough, boy was I wrong.This card beats Titan in so many games and in so many resolutions and is almost $500 cheaper, its also $100 cheaper than the GTX 780 and anywhere from 5% to 20% faster than the 780, that is just amazing.
Hopefully this trickles down to the medium range cards and we are going to see cards like the 280x go for less than $250.
I mean unless Nvidia positiones the Titan at $550 as well, then I don't think it will sell very much at all. In the 290x you have a better performing card at almost half the price, Nvidia has its work cut out for them and I sure hope the 780 TI edition really brings in the performance and price as well.
eanazag - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I'm sporting a Nvidia GPU in my rig. I don't see any option for Nvidia than to reduce both the Titan, 770, and 780 in cost. I can't expect the 780 Ti performance to trump the Titan. I will say that there is power and cooling room for Nvidia to ratchet things up and make this interesting. This is bold move on AMDs part and does wonders for consumers. Based on some of the other comments current news does not kill off either brand by the way. PC gaming and desktops are not dead.....kwrzesien - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Ryan, can we get a pipeline article or retweet this article when it is complete? Thanks!spiked_mistborn - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Nice job AMD! Competition is good! Also, feel free to use my GSYNC idea about putting a frame buffer in the display and letting the video card control the refresh rate. This post is from March 2013. Apparently adding a dash to make it G-Sync makes it different somehow. http://techreport.com/discussion/24553/inside-the-...Sorodsam - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I'm surprised no one's commented on the new "AMD Center", or this troubling text:"You've landed on the AMD Portal on AnandTech. This section is sponsored by AMD."
There's a big difference between a site that runs an occasional AMD ad and a site with an entire section that's expressively "sponsored by AMD", especially considering AnandTech's (former?) guiding principle that product reviewers shouldn't be aware of who exactly is buying advertising and when. They can hardly be unaware of it now.
MrMaestro - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The reason people aren't commenting on it is because it's already been commented on. Take a look at the article announcing AMD Centre. That is the appropriate place for such comments.anevmann - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Ryan, will this card require PCIe 3.0 for gaming?Can you do a test with and without PCIe 3.0? I really want this card, but I wanna know in advance if I have to upgrade my system.
A
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
I can't promise when it will be done (given the insanity of our schedule over the next 3 weeks), but at some point we will follow this up with a reprise article, that among other things will cover PCIe bandwidth vs. Crossfire scaling, CF testing in quiet mode, and some noise equalization to see what fan levels it would take to match a GTX 780 and what the resulting performance would look like.Anyhow, for a single card setup none of my data thus far supports PCIe 3.0 being a requirement. We're not to the point yet where PCIe 2.0 x16 is a general gaming bottleneck.
Hung_Low - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Is 290X really the absolute maxed out version Tahiti? Or did it also leave a lot of room like Titan is for GK110.Perhaps the GPUs used in 290x are those Tahiti's with imperfection, with the high quality Tahiti's saved for extreme edition 290x/290x+ ?