By Thomas Morgan Published Sunday, 15 December 2013
Forged with its latest GCN 1.1 architecture at centre, the AMD R9 290X sports a cutting edge Hawaii XT chipset that sets out to better Nvidia's cards - right up to the mighty GTX Titan - for a considerable discount. And unlike the 260X and 270X cards released earlier this year, which were simple rebrands of the existing HD 7790 and 7870 GPUs respectively, this is the company's most forward-thinking entry in the series yet. In amongst support for the pending Mantle API, a unique on-chip TrueAudio sound processing technology makes the cut, plus an ambitious push for gaming at full 4K resolution.
At over £400 this is a wee bit on the dear side for many, but fortunately we now have a cut-down edition of the card in our hands as well: the R9 290, With a mind to achieve a more agreeable circa £300 price-tag, concessions are made to its specs in all the right places - all while still producing competitive results compared to Nvidia's very best.
As part of this eager push for 4K gaming, both the R9 290 and 290X offer up the widest memory buses of any AMD card ever released, counting in at a remarkable 512-bit. This opens the floodgates to some blazing fast access speeds to its 4GB pool of 5GHz RAM, the result being an overall fill-rate of 320GB/s for each card. It's a number that sounds excessive on paper, but any games operating at 2560x1440 and beyond with a lick of MSAA will soon see this statistic put to practical use. For the cheaper 290 variant, cutbacks are made in alternative areas: it takes the 1000MHz maximum core clock of the 290X down to 947MHz, active compute units from 176 to 160, while stream processors get chopped from 2816 to a still respectable count of 2560.
Radeon R9 290/290X specs
specs
Taking charge at the top of the Volcanic Islands line to succeed the Sea Islands series, we have the R9 290X. This is a muscular card that gives us the first flash of AMD's new Hawaii XT chipset, built through a 28-nanometre manufacturing process - with support for the company's own Mantle API, DirectX 11.2, plus the on-board TrueAudio sound processing chip previously seen in the 260X.
1000MHz Core Engine clock max (947MHz on 290)
4GB GDDR5 memory
1250MHz memory clock (5GHz effective)
512-bit memory bus
320GB/s memory bandwidth
GCN 1.1 architecture
64 ROPs
2816 stream processors (2560 on 290)
176 compute units (160 on 290)
PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface
The R9 290 is about £100 cheaper and the cutbacks are minor: the maximum clock speed is downgraded by five per cent, stream processors are chopped back to 2560 and the active compute unit count decreased to 160.
And that's your lot. Remarkably, all other specs remain in place between AMD's two new Hawaii chipset cards - but the biggest difference is in pricing. At the time of writing the R9 290 can be found for as little as £299, as compared to the approximate going rate of £420 for the elder 290X. It also massively undercuts Nvidia rivals such as the GTX 780 and 780 Ti despite bearing competitive specs, and comes in at 40 per cent of the GTX Titan's current price of £760. For AMD's plucky 290 to come even close to these contenders would be a remarkable feat indeed.
