14 DAY TRIAL // The Radeon R9 290 graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is weaker than the R9 290X, but not by much, since it does, in the end, use the same GPU, albeit slightly scaled down. Thus, the price is also lower. Surprisingly, though, it's lower by more than one would expect.
Which is to say, the graphics adapter will ship for $449.99 /€449.99, which is $100 / €100 less than the $549.99 / €549.99 of the flagship model.
With the launch of the R9 290, Advanced Micro Devices will really seal the deal on the video card market.
NVIDIA will probably have problems selling its products once the new boards hit their stride, and will need to cut prices on all its boards in general.
After all, the Radeon R9 290 has a GPU frequency of 946 MHz according to leaked specifications, as well as 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM working over a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.
That's just 256 processors and 16 TMUs less than the R9 290X, and 34 MHz below the clock of the 290X.
More importantly, some R9 290X benchmarks surfaced days ago (WCCFTech), where the product was shown to be faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 in some cases.
So when you have an adapter that is as good or better than the competition, but sells for $200 / €200 less, you don't have to be a genius to know what will happen next.
Arabic publication DarkLord Tech has some other test results that corroborate these findings, and our previous article on the matter.
Just a short time ago, a leak exposed the capabilities of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti, showing it faster than GTX Titan. If the price turns out to be $650 / €650, it will become NVIDIA's saving grace, especially if the rest of the product range scales down in price too. If, instead, the price turns out to be $1,000 / €1,000, AMD might be in for a very good year.
