14 DAY TRIAL // Unlike the Radeon R9 290X graphics card, the Radeon R9 290 is not yet available, and it won't be for a week or so. That doesn't mean benchmarks aren't being made for it though.
In fact, the folks at Overclockers UK (OCUK) have provided the world with the results of tests for the new video card.
Apparently, the Radeon R9 290 is stronger than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780, in synthetic benchmarks at least.
Unigine Heaven 3.0 at 1080p and 1440p resolutions (with normal level of tessellation), 3DMark 11 (performance preset), and 3DMark Fire Strike (both Normal and Extreme) are some of the tests run.
It's not totally sure that the board is the one we believe it is, since the name is blurred, but the performance doesn't leave much room for speculation.
And with Radeon R9 290X matching and even besting NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan, it makes sense for the one immediately below it to do the same to the GTX 780.
For those who want a summary of the technical details, the Radeon R9 290 has 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM working over a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.
The base clock frequency of the graphics processing unit is 947 MHz, and there is no Boost state because AMD decided to forgo the notion in spec sheets.
Maybe it was because people mostly really paid attention to the max clock anyway, so mentioning the base speed didn't really matter. Now, AMD makes it sound as though the board's maximum clock is the base clock, and that the dynamic clock adjustment technology is there to scale down performance when the PC doesn't need anything strenuous done.
Sales of the Radeon R9 290 should begin on October 31 for a price that has yet to be disclosed.
