This isn't the Radeon R9 290X, but it is almost as good

Oct 7, 2013 08:40 GMT  ·  By

Last week, we brought you the specifications of the AMD Radeon R9 290X, and the apparent price of $729.99 / €729.99, and now we have something more to share, namely the specs of the Radeon R9 290.

So far, the Radeon R9 290 hasn't benefited from much attention. Part of the reason was the lack of rumors and leaks about it, and the other part was that everyone was more interested in the R9 290X.

Still, the Radeon R9 290 will be a powerful graphics card all on its own, even if not quite on the same level as the X-version.

We can thank the Japanese for the final specifications on this particular high-end graphics adapter. Had they not been so quick to leak the technical details, we'd still be wondering.

AMD Radeon R9 290 has 2,560 stream processors, a GPU frequency of 948 MHz, 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (over 512-bit interface), a memory speed of 5 GHz, single-precision floating point performance of 4.9 TFLOP/s, and support for DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and Mantle.

All in all, the specifications are quite close to those of the flagship adapter, down to the PCI Express 3.0 support and two power inputs (one 6-pin, one 8-pin).

We have no trouble believing that if the Radeon R9 290X fails to sell for $699 / €699, then the R9 290 will.

For those who want a reminder about the capabilities of the R9 290X, they are one step above the R9 290 in terms of GPU performance, but not much else.

The Hawaii graphics processing unit operates at 1 GHz and has 2,815 stream processors, leading to single-precision floating point performance of 5.16 TFLOP/s.

Most Radeon R9 and R7 video adapters should show up this week, but the R9 290 might wait until October 15 or later, when R9 290X is set to come out.