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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Antiflash - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I've usually prefer Nvidia Cards, but they have it well deserved when decided to price GK110 to the stratosphere just "because they can" and had no competition. That's poor way to treat your customers and taking advantage of fanboys. Full implementation of Tesla and Fermi were always priced around $500. Pricing Keppler GK110 at $650+ was stupid. It's silicon after all, you should get more performance for the same price each year. Not more performance at a premium price as Nvidia tried to do this generation. AMD is not doing anything extraordinary here they are just not following nvidia price gouging practices and $550 is their GPU at historical market prices for their flagship GPU. We would not have been having this discussion if Nvidia had done the same with GK110.blitzninja - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
OMG, why won't you people get it? The Titan is a COMPUTE-GAMING HYBRID card, it's for professionals who run PRO apps (ie. Adobe Media product line, 3D Modeling, CAD, etc) but are also gamers and don't want to have SLI setups for gaming + compute or they can't afford to do so.A Quadro card is $2500, this card has 1 less SMX unit and no PRO customer driver support but is $1000 and does both Gaming AND Compute, as far as low-level professionals are concerned this thing is the very definition of steal. Heck, you SLI two of these things and you're still up $500 from a K6000.
What usually happens is the company they work at will have Quadro workstations and at home the employee has a Titan. Sure it's not as good but it gets the job done until you get back to work.
Please check your shit. Everyone saying R9 290X--and yes I agree for gaming it's got some real good price/performance--destroys the Titan is ignorant and needs to do some good long research into:
A. How well the Titan sold
B. The size of the compute market and MISSING PRICE POINTS in said market.
C. The amount of people doing compute who are also avid gamers.
chimaxi83 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Impressive. This cards beats Nvidia on EVERY level! Price, performance, features, power..... every level. Nvidia paid the price for gouging it's customers, they are going to lose a ton of marketshare. I doubt they have anything to match this for at least a year.Berzerker7 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Sounds like a bot. The card is worse than a Titan on every point except high resolution (read: 4K), including power, temperature and noise.testbug00 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Er, the Titan beats it on being higher priced, looking nicer, having a better cooler and using less power.even in 1080p a 290x approxs ties (slightly ahead according to techpowerup (4%)) the Titan.
Well, a $550 card that can tie a $1000 card in a resolution a card that fast really shouldn't be bought for (seriously, if you are playing in 1200p or less there is no reason to buy any GPU over $400 unless you plan to ugprade screens soon)
Sancus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The Titan was a $1000 card when it was released.... 8 months ago. So for 8 months nvidia has had the fastest card and been able to sell it at a ridiculous price premium(even at $1000, supply of Titans was quite limited, so it's not like they would have somehow benefited from setting the price lower... in fact Titan would probably have made more money for Nvidia at an even HIGHER price).The fact that ATI is just barely matching Nvidia at regular resolutions and slightly beating them at 4k, 8 months later, is a baseline EXPECTATION. It's hardly an achievement. If they had released anything less than the 290X they would have completely embarrassed themselves.
And I should point out that they're heavily marketing 4k resolution for this card and yet frame pacing in Crossfire even with their 'fixes' is still pretty terrible, and if you are seriously planning to game at 4k you need Crossfire to be actually usable, which it has never really been.
anubis44 - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The margin of victory for the R9 290X over the Titan at 4K resolutions is not 'slight', it's substantial. HardOCP says it's 10-15% faster on average. That's a $550 card that's 10-15% faster than a $1000 card.What was that about AMD being embarassed?
Sancus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
By the time more than 1% of the people buying this card even have 4k monitors 20nm cards will have been on sale for months. Not only that but you would basically go deaf next to a Crossfire 290x setup which is what you need for 4k. And anyway, the 290x is faster only because it's been monstrously over clocked beyond the ability of its heatsink to cool it properly. 780/Titan are still far more viable 2/3/4 GPU cards because of their superior noise and power consumption.All 780s overclock to considerably faster than this card at ALL resolutions so the gtx 780ti is probably just an OCed 780, and it will outperform the 290x while still being 10db quieter.
DMCalloway - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
You mention monstrously OC'ing the 290x yet have no problem OC'ing the 780 in order to create a 780ti. Everyone knows that aftermarket coolers will keep the noise and temps. in check when released. Let's deal with the here and now, not speculate on future cards. Face it; AMD at least matches or beats a card costing $100 more which will cause Nvidia to launch the 780ti at less than current 780 prices.Sancus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
You don't understand how pricing works. AMD is 8 months late to the game. They've released a card that is basically the GTX Titan, except it uses more than 50W more power and has a bargain basement heatsink. That's why it's $100 cheaper. Because AMD is the one who are far behind and the only way for them to compete is on price. They demonstrably can't compete purely based on performance, if the 290X was WAY better than the GTX Titan, AMD would have priced it higher because guess what, AMD needs to make a profit too -- and they consistently have lost money for years now.The company that completely owned the market to the point they could charge $1000 for a video card are the winners here, not the one that arrived out of breath at the finish line 8 months later.
I would love for AMD to be competitive *at a competitive time* so that we didn't have to pay $650 for a GTX 780, but the fact of the matter is that they're simply not.