14 DAY TRIAL // Last night, AMD broadcasted its launch event in Hawaii over the Internet in real time, through Livestream and YouTube. Now that everything has been said and done, we can finally take stock of the important parts. As we expected, the company introduced the R9 290X flagship graphics card. But already the surprises have started, and not all of them are good.
First off, the video board isn't becoming available after all. The Sunnyvale company presented it as part of the 2014 GPU lineup, and gave October 3, 2013 as the earliest date when pre-orders can be placed.
Maybe we'll get a bit of luck and see the product ship before the end of the year, like on Christmas, but we won't hold our breath yet.
Also, the company didn't provide all the specifications, though it did confirm the memory amount (4 GB GDDR5 VRAM) and mentioned that the R9 290X would possess over 6 billion transistors and the AMD True Audio technology.
TrueAudio technology is a fully programmable audio engine which, the same way programmable shaders revolutionized graphics, will enhance sound, allowing you to hear hundreds more voices and channels than what CPUs can pull off today.
And considering that AMD is working with others to bring virtual surround sound in headphones, we can expect some better virtual 3D headsets soon. Not as good as true 7.1 sound, but it's not like only the two front speakers/headphones could ever really match that.
Moving on, AMD kept the price to itself, so we still don't know with complete certainty whether it will be hundreds of dollars/euro cheaper than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan it allegedly outpaces.
The live blog did expose some other details though: Hawaii is the first GPU to support DX 11.2, can scale from 1W devices to 1kW workstations, can manage 5 teraflops of compute power (the first GPU to cross that threshold apparently).
An interesting thing to point out: AMD was the first to actually pass 1 TF, 2 TF, 3 TF and 4 TF. Add to that the 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth and a geometrical performance of 4 billion triangles per second (twice as much as the previous AMD flagship) and you can stack 100 layers of effects at 4K resolution.
In addition to the R9 290X, AMD announced the R9 280X, R9 270X, R9 260X and R7 250, with 3 GB, 2 GB, 2 GB and 1 GB VRAM, respectively.
And that's it, it only announced them. There was no spec data or release info on them at all, save for the prices ($299 / €299, $199 / €199, $139 / €139 and under $89 / €89) and FireStrike benchmark scores (over 6,800, 5,500, 3,700 and 2,000, respectively).
Oddly, the R9 290X wasn't given a FireStrike score. Anyway, at least this all suggests that the R9 290X price might actually be that of $600 / €600 we've been clamoring for.
