14 DAY TRIAL // There are many graphics cards on the market, but to date only Advanced Micro Devices has models with 512-bit interfaces, not counting dual-GPU adapters.
According to the company, or at least Corporate Vice President of Global Channel Sales Roy Taylor, that has a much greater bearing on performance than people realize.
In an interview with TweakTown, he said that gamers should choose the Radeon R9 290X “with its 515-bit memory bus” right now.
It's true that the memory bus has a significant impact on visual performance and texture draw rate, especially at high resolutions like 4K. On the other hand, benchmarks between AMD and NVIDIA cards have always proven quite balanced, more or less.
Then again, Taylor's “advice” seemed to hinge just as much on the price of $370 / €370 the R9 290X sells for now. Considering that some still sell for over $400 / €400 or more, we can understand why he would make that suggestion. The card really does seem to have become a fair bit cheaper than it used to be.
Maybe this means that a new generation of AMD video cards is approaching. Unfortunately, no conclusive evidence exists to that effect. The VP himself avoided answering when posed the query. Alas.
