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
Hitman: Absolution
The second-to-last game in our lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.
Hitman is another game that makes the 290X shine, with the 290X taking a 16% lead over the GTX 780. In fact we’re getting very close to being CPU limited here, which may be limiting just how far ahead the 290X can pull. However this also means there’s plenty of GPU headroom for enabling MSAA, which we don’t use in this benchmark.
Moving on to 4K, the 290X once again extends its lead, this time by among the largest such leads to 30% over the GTX 780. This is actually good enough for 43fps even at Ultra quality, but for better than that you’ll need multiple GPUs.
To that end we’re CPU limited at 2560, though for some reason the GTX 780 SLI fares a bit better regardless. Otherwise at 4K the GTX 780 SLI achieves better scaling than the 290X CF – 64% versus 56% –so while it can’t take the lead it does at least close the gap some. Though enough of a gap remains that the GTX 780 SLI will still come a bit short of 60fps at 4K Ultra settings, which makes the 290X CF the only setup capable of achieving that goal.
When it comes to minimum framerates the 290X is able to build on its lead just a bit more here at both 2560 and 4K. In both cases the performance advantage over the GTX 780 grows by a further 3%.
Finally, for our delta percentages we can see that unfortunately for AMD they are regressing a bit here. The variance for the 290X CF at 2560 is 24%, which is greater than what the 280X CF was already seeing, and significantly greater than the GTX 780 SLI. Consequently Hitman is a good example of how although AMD’s CF frame pacing situation is generally quite good, there are going to be games where they need to buckle down a bit more and get it under control, as evidenced by what NVIDIA has been able to achieve. Though it is interesting to note that AMD’s frame pacing at 4K improves over 2K, by over 8%. AMD would seem to have an easier time keeping frame times under control when they’re outright longer, which isn’t wholly surprising since it means there’s more absolute time to resolve the matter.
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xres625e - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
sterven..eddieveenstra - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
stoere jongen ben je.... bah.TrantaLocked - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Hm I wonder why I can find the 290X for $550 on newegg?Dal Makhani - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
lol AMD fanboy. This card is alright, nothing "uber". It brings some proper pricing sense back into the green team's head which is needed, the gtx 780 will be dropped to R9 290X pricing, and the 780 Ti will be Nvidia's new 650 dollar card. But to justify 100 dollar price difference, i dont know if 780 Ti can show big enough gains. That will be interesting to see next month.tuklap - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I doubt that nvidia gtx 780 will drop price on par with r9 290x..just4U - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I doubt it as well.. They didn't ever really drop prices on the 560Ti until it EOL..mfergus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Well it's uber in the sense that it brings much needed competition to Nvidia's very high priced high end cards. Nobody should of thought this card was going to be revolutionary though, it's on the same 28nm as all the other cards and it has the same architecture as the 7790 which had very minor compute changes compared to GCN 1.0dragonsqrrl - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Dropping the 780 by $100 is the very least Nvidia would have to do to remain competitive, and personally I don't think that would be nearly enough. The 290X is performance competitive with Titan, and despite the fact that Titan is cooler, quieter, consumes less power, has a much better shroud, and superior DP performance, it should come down to the same price as the 290X to remain competitive due to the slightly higher performance of the 290X. A ~$550 Titan or ~$400 780 would be amazing.mfergus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I don't expect Titan's price to change much but I could be wrong. I never really thought of it as a standard gaming card, it's a total halo product with lots of memory and the only non Quadro/Tesla with full DP performance. The 780ti will be cheaper than Titan though and faster in gaming performance.Bloodcalibur - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
You truly are an idiot if you think that the Titan should be compared to a 290X and that the sentence ends there. The Titan itself only performs a small bit above nvidia's own 780, but the $350 price difference is there for it's compute performance. It's basically a budget workstation card with higher than 780 gaming abilities for those who game AND do a little bit of 3D computing. Derp.This retard actually suggested a gaming/workstation hybrid pried at $1000 should compete downwards with a $550 gaming card.