AMD has officially launched the Radeon R9 290X, the high-end graphics card for enthusiasts and gamers. With its 2816 shader cores, this card targets the GeForce GTX 780.
Unlike the rebranded R9 280X which is a Radeon HD 7970 (AMD didn’t take the time to change the device ID…), the Radeon R9 290X is based on a new piece of silicon called Hawaii.
The Hawaii GPU packs 2816 stream processors (over 44 compute units –64 SP/CU, see architecture diagram HERE), GCN 1.1,
64 ROPs, 4GB of GDDR5 graphics memory (8GB variants in the works…) on a 512-bit bus width, AMD TrueAudio, Direct3D 11.2 (tiled resources or mega-textures), new PowerTune architecture. The Hawaii GPU is able to process 4 primitives / clock which is twice the number of the HD 7970.
And the price? Around USD $550!
According to the reviews, the Radeon R9 290X is faster and cheaper than the GeForce GTX 780!!
Radeon R9 R290X Specifications
- GPU: Hawaii @ 1000MHz, 28nm TSMC, 6.2 billion transistor
- Shaders units: 2816 (44 compute units)
- Texture units: 176
- ROPs: 64
- TDP: 250W
- Power connectors: 6-pin + 8-pin
- Memory: 4GB GDDR5 @ 1250MHz real speed or 5000MHz effective, 512-bit
R9 290X TrueAudio architecture
R9 290X PowerTune architecture
Raw performance test with ShaderToyMark – (source)
Selected Reviews
AMD FTW!!!!
Ok, how about tessmark?
“Ok, how about tessmark?”
Rather disappointing, given the fat that Hawaii doubles the setup throughput.
could you guys check some computational power? (can it beat nvidia in raytracing?)
It can beat nvidia in luxrender. It can’t beat it in actual production renderer since both nvidia and amd opencl drivers are bad and everyone is using cuda…
tessmark still not quite appealing.. http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7457/59316.png
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7457/59313.png
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7457/59314.png