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
A Note On Crossfire, 4K Compatibility, Power, & The Test
Before we dive into our formal testing, there are a few brief testing notes that bear mentioning.
First and foremost, on top of our normal testing we did some additional Crossfire compatibility testing to see if AMD’s new XDMA Crossfire implementation ran into any artifacting or other issues that we didn’t experience elsewhere. The good news there is that outside of the typical scenarios where games simply don’t scale with AFR – something that affects SLI and CF equally – we didn’t see any artifacts in the games themselves. The closest we came to a problem was with the intro videos for Total War: Rome 2, which have black horizontal lines due to the cards trying to AFR render said video at a higher framerate than it played at. Once in-game Rome was relatively fine; relatively because it’s one of the games we have that doesn’t see any performance benefit from AFR.
Unfortunately AMD’s drivers for 290X are a bit raw when it comes to Crossfire. Of note, when running at a 4K resolution, we had a few instances of loading a game triggering an immediate system reboot. Now we’ve had crashes before, but nothing quite like this. After reporting it to AMD, AMD tells us that they’ve been able to reproduce the issue and have fixed it for the 290X launch drivers, which will be newer than the press drivers we used. Once those drivers are released we’ll be checking to confirm, but we have no reason to doubt AMD at this time.
Speaking of 4K, due to the two controller nature of the PQ321 monitor we use there are some teething issues related to using 4K right now. Most games are fine at 4K, however we have found games that both NVIDIA and AMD have trouble with at one point or another. On the NVIDIA side Metro will occasionally lock up after switching resolutions, and on the AMD side GRID 2 will immediately crash if using the two controller (4K@60Hz) setup. In the case of the latter dropping down to a single controller (4K@30Hz) satisfies GRID while allowing us to test at 4K resolutions, and with V-sync off it doesn’t have a performance impact versus 60Hz, but it is something AMD and Codemasters will need to fix.
Furthermore we also wanted to offer a quick update on the state of Crossfire on AMD’s existing bridge based (non-XDMA) cards. The launch drivers for the 290X do not contain any further Crossfire improvements for bridge based cards, which means Eyefinity Crossfire frame pacing is still broken for all APIs. Of particular note for our testing, the 280X Crossfire setup ends up in a particularly nasty failure mode, simply dropping every other frame. It’s being rendered, as evidenced by the consumption of the Present call, however as our FCAT testing shows it’s apparently not making it to the master card. This has the humorous outcome of making the frame times rather smooth, but it makes Crossfire all but worthless as the additional frames are never displayed. Hopefully AMD can put a fork in the matter once and for all next month.
A Note On Testing Methodologies & Sustained Performance
Moving on to the matter of our testing methodology, we want to make note of some changes since our 280X review earlier this month. After having initially settled on Metro: Last Light for our gaming power/temp/noise benchmark, in a spot of poor planning on our part we have discovered that Metro scales poorly on SLI/CF setups, and as a result doesn't push those setups very hard. As such we have switched from Metro to Crysis 3 for our power/temp/noise benchmarking, as Crysis 3 was our second choice and has a similar degree of consistency to it as Metro while scaling very nicely across both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU setups. For single-GPU cards the impact on noise is measurably minor, as the workloads are similar, however power consumption will be a bit different due to the difference in CPU workloads between the benchmarks.
We also want to make quick note of our testing methodologies and how they are or are not impacted by temperature based throttling. For years we have done all of our GPU benchmarking by looping gaming benchmarks multiple times, both to combat the inherent run-to-run variation that we see in benchmarking, and more recently to serve as a warm-up activity for cards with temperature based throttling. While these methods have proved sufficient for the Radeon 7000 series, the GeForce 600 series, and even the GeForce 700 series, due to the laws of physics AMD's 95C throttle point takes longer to get to than NVIDIA's 80C throttle point. As a result it's harder to bring the 290X up to its sustained temperatures before the end of our benchmark runs. It will inevitably hit 95C in quiet mode, but not every benchmark runs long enough to reach that before the 3rd or 4th loop.
For the sake of consistency with past results we have not altered our benchmark methodology. However we wanted to be sure to point out this fact before getting to benchmarking, so that there’s no confusion over how we’re handling the matter. Consequently we believe our looping benchmarks run long enough to generally reach sustained performance numbers, but in all likelihood some of our numbers on the shortest benchmarks will skew low. For the next iteration of our benchmark suite we’re most likely going to need to institute a pre-heating phase for all cards to counter AMD’s 95C throttle point.
The Drivers
The press drivers for the 290X are Catalyst 13.11 Beta v5 (The “v” is AMD’s nomenclature), which identify themselves as being from the driver branch 13.250. These are technically still in the 200 branch of AMD’s drivers, but this is the first appearance of 250, as Catalyst 13.11 Beta v1 was still 13.200. AMD doesn’t offer release notes on these beta drivers, but we found that they offered distinct improvements in GRID 2 and to a lesser extent Battlefield 3, and have updated our earlier results accordingly.
Meanwhile for NVIDIA we’re using the recently released “game ready” 331.58 WHQL drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X XFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 331.58 AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v1 AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v5 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
396 Comments
View All Comments
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.