This is the information that we've all been waiting for

Oct 1, 2013 09:50 GMT  ·  By

Even though no one expects AMD to release its Hawaii-based graphics card before October 15, a card made its way into the hands of a person known as Grant Kim. One thing led to another and now we know exactly what to expect from the new video board.

First off, the GPU core operates at 800 MHz, but there is no dynamic overclocking this time. Actually, AMD went the opposite route.

Basically, 800 MHz is the base speed, but the clock can be lowered, according to load and temperature, if there isn't any demanding game running.

Meanwhile, the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at 1125 MHz, 4.5 GHz effective, leading to a bandwidth of 288 GB/s over the 512-bit interface.

This actually doesn't fit AMD's claim that the newcomer exceeds 300 GB/s, but at least it's close. Besides, maybe the memory can go faster but no one figured out how to make it happen. Or maybe the boards coming two weeks from now will have 5 GHz VRAM.

Anyway, Grant Kim was quite thorough in his testing of the board. He ran benchmarks in Aliens vs. Predators, Battlefield 3, Crysis 3, GRID 2, Tomb Raider (2013), RAGE, and TESV: Skyrim.

Frame-rates and frame-latency were both measured, against the accomplishments of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan. Kim even ran the games at 5760 x 1080 pixels resolution (so, that's multi-monitor via Eyefinity) albeit in no-antialiasing, FXAA, and MSAA modes.

Interestingly enough, Radeon R9 290X doesn't actually run ahead of the NVIDIA Titan, at least not every time. Some of this can be explained by the different ways NVIDIA and AMD handle multi-monitor setups. There's also the clear driver difference: NVIDIA's titan used the latest WHQL driver, while AMD's new board still needs refinements.

Most notably, the R9 290X does better in Tomb Raider (2013) and GRID 2, but in Crysis 3 and Battlefield 3, it's not a fair comparison because those two support NVIDIA's MSAA and FXAA, yet were tested without it. See all the tests below.

Tomb Raider:

Rage:

TESV: Skyrim

GRID 2

Crysis 3

Battlefield 3

Photo Gallery (21 Images)

AMD Radeon R9 290X benchmarked
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