14 DAY TRIAL // AMD Radeon R9 290 will take on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780, but its price sounds rather too good to be true. Nevertheless, it seems to be genuine. We'll only know for certain tomorrow, since AMD delayed the thing's release to November 5 instead of launching it on October 31 as planned.
As we have mentioned previously, it was because AMD came up with a driver that supposedly improved performance magnificently.
Which brings us to the main point: when a graphics card has 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM and a 512-bit wide memory interface, the price of $450 / €450 sounds too good to be true.
Nevertheless, it really does seem to be true. Despite being better than the previous high-end NVIDIA 700 series, it has the price of a third-rate add-in card.
Then again, when the overpowered AMD Radeon R9 290X has a tag of $550 / €550 despite being the best AMD card ever, there isn't much room to maneuver.
Radeon R9 290 has a GPU core clock of 948 MHz and a memory clock of 6 GHz.
In another time, it may have become the flagship itself, given that it uses the same Hawaii GPU as the R9 290X.
Alas, AMD needed to overwhelm the Titan somehow, so it couldn't do what NVIDIA did with the GTX 780: make it with the second-best 28nm GPU (GK104 instead of GK110) and hold off on the true flagship (GK110) until it needed to outdo its rival again.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is following up on its intention with the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, which utilizes a GK110 and is better than even Titan in benchmarks, despite having half the VRAM. For that matter, it outdoes the R9 290X too, according to leaked test slides.
Right now, this is what the high-end landscape looks like: NVIDIA GTX Titan ($1,000 / €1,000), GTX 780 Ti ($699 / €699, despite being better than Titan apparently), AMD Radeon R9 290X ($550 / €550 but about as good as Titan), Radeon R9 ($450 / €450), GTX 780 ($500 or more, despite being on the same level as R9 290) and all other GTX and Radeon boards under them.
It's a bizarre and complicated picture, all in all.