News - AMD Radeon R9 290X pictured for the world to see

[Spreadie]

Why the nvidia fan club even bother looking I will never know. They will always try and slate it. They need as Ati if they didn't have could you imagine the prices then. Nvidia cards are already stupidly priced. Not all of us are named Rockefeller or Rothschild with a few million in the bank.

Are nvidia cards any good, of cause they are but they need the competition.

Screw u, n00b AMD fanboi!!!111oneone Nvidia r teh best, init?!

I rather hope AMD's latest cards tear the 700 series a new one. AMD could do with some time at the top of the pile, to generate some more revenue to help with future development; and compete on both GPU and CPU fronts. I'm tired of Intel releasing incremental CPU updates and price gouging because of limited competition. If the R9 series kick ass, we'll see nvidia's top end model prices tumble.

[valhar2000]

Mantle does sound awesome. A super fast API thats open to all GPU's is what PC gaming needs.

Take note nVidia * O P E N * to the whole industry.

What about Mantle is open? As far as I can tell, it's an API developed by AMD for use with AMD cards. No different from CUDA or PhysX.

[bmdc]

moeburn you're either high or lying. My 7950 @ 1150/1600 and 3570k @ 4.5ghz cant even 60 fps all games on max.

[Brewster0101]

I paid $200 for my Radeon 5770, 5 years ago. I can still play the latest games at 60fps at max settings at 1080p (PayDay 2, GRID 2, for example),

Yeah , they are the latest games....

and I can play even the most demanding of games like BF3 and SC: Blacklist at 30fps at mid settings at 1080p.

So you can play latest games at Mid settings and get 30fsp, not the 60 FSP on high settings like you claimed above.

[jigger]

What about Mantle is open? As far as I can tell, it's an API developed by AMD for use with AMD cards. No different from CUDA or PhysX.

Mantle is open source. Everything Nvidia offer to the industry is proprietary or come with strings attached.

[jigger]

Mantle does sound exciting, so long as the performance & stability is there. Anything that distances Microsoft and their control of DirectX from gaming has got to be a good thing! If Mantle is truly cross-platform, maybe Valve's vision of Linux being the future of gaming might be right

Another interesting thing to come out of the AMD presentation is their focus on hardware positional audio. I've always thought that the emphasis on visuals at the virtual exclusion of audio in games in recent years was a lost opportunity.

The audio in the BF4 video was great. The fire fight in the radar room at the start with headphones was excellent.

[scaryjim]

Mantle is open source.

I highly doubt it will be open source, but the rumour is that it will be an open API - that is, AMD will publish the specifications, which should allow nvidia (and intel/via/other graphics manufacturers, should they so choose) to write drivers that will respond to Mantle API calls as well as DX ones. But since AMD will control Mantle, the chances are it will always work better on AMD hardware as they'll always be ahead of the development curve in terms of the drivers and API development.

Of course, if AMD want Mantle to be truly cross-platform they will need to look at the Linux world, and either massively improve their binary blob drivers or start fully supporting the open-source drivers. And if they did the latter it would give their competitors a fairly detailed look into the internal workings of Mantle anyway...

[KeyboardDemon]

I paid $200 for my Radeon 5770, 5 years ago.

I won't question your performance measurements as others have already covered that, but I would like to know how you managed to buy a 5770 a year before it was launched in October 2009?

I haven't watched the video yet, it's too long! What I want to see is performance figures and some bullet points on the tech, have these been published anywhere yet?

[kalniel]

I haven't watched the video yet, it's too long! What I want to see is performance figures and some bullet points on the tech, have these been published anywhere yet?

Tech, no. Performance of the range apart from the top one, yes - but they are wildly vague 3dmark firestrike scores which seem to be remarkably conservative (ie identical to the current generation of cards more or less).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like the R9 290X is $600 before tax:

http://www.techpowerup.com/191543/ra...ice-point.html

This puts it $50 below the pre-tax price of the GTX780 in the US.

Edit!!

Hands-on with the card:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MU-D...tu.be&t=11m38s

It seems to light up!!

BTW,the card(according to the first link) uses a 384 bit memory controller.

[Kumagoro]

I keep seeing people writing that mantle and physix are the same (proprietary wise ). But nvidia purposefully block physical from working on AMD cards, so unless that has changed that seems to me to be the biggest most obvious difference.

[scaryjim]

I keep seeing people writing that mantle and cuda are the same (proprietary wise ). But nvidia purposefully block cuda from working on AMD cards, so unless that has changed that seems to me to be the biggest most obvious difference.

There has yet to be an official annoucement regarding the openness or otherwise of Mantle. All the slides have simply said that it will work on any Graphics Core Next GPU - so that locks out all other manufacturers and also pre-7-series AMD graphics cards, as well as Llano/Trinity/Richland/Brazos APUs - and that it enables additional performance from AMD hardware; neither of those is a particularly inclusive statement. One of the articles about it said the journalist had been told it would be an open API, but that's yet to be confirmed or denied by AMD. So until we hear something official, I don't think it's surprising that a lot of people are being very wary about it.

If AMD do open up the API so nvidia, intel et al can benefit from the improvements brought through a low-level API, then that'll be fair enough. But you can understand the temptation to keep it an AMD-only feature, and given how well AMD's dev relations team have been doing recently I could quite easily see them essentially owning the PC gaming space by having their £100 GPUs outperform nvidia's £300+ GPUs in Mantle-enabled games...

[Raggedstone]

I highly doubt it will be open source, but the rumour is that it will be an open API - that is, AMD will publish the specifications, which should allow nvidia (and intel/via/other graphics manufacturers, should they so choose) to write drivers that will respond to Mantle API calls as well as DX ones. But since AMD will control Mantle, the chances are it will always work better on AMD hardware as they'll always be ahead of the development curve in terms of the drivers and API development.

Of course, if AMD want Mantle to be truly cross-platform they will need to look at the Linux world, and either massively improve their binary blob drivers or start fully supporting the open-source drivers. And if they did the latter it would give their competitors a fairly detailed look into the internal workings of Mantle anyway...

There is no copyright in an API anyway. AMD would not be able to stop nVidia duplicating the API, provided they did a clean room implementation (i.e. Didn't copy any of the code that implements the API). Google vs Oracle pretty much laid that to rest (although there will be appeal). Unless the API itself is patented, in which case they could enforce exclusivity based on that.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There has yet to be an official annoucement regarding the openness or otherwise of Mantle. All the slides have simply said that it will work on any Graphics Core Next GPU - so that locks out all other manufacturers and also pre-7-series AMD graphics cards, as well as Llano/Trinity/Richland/Brazos APUs - and that it enables additional performance from AMD hardware; neither of those is a particularly inclusive statement. One of the articles about it said the journalist had been told it would be an open API, but that's yet to be confirmed or denied by AMD. So until we hear something official, I don't think it's surprising that a lot of people are being very wary about it.

If AMD do open up the API so nvidia, intel et al can benefit from the improvements brought through a low-level API, then that'll be fair enough. But you can understand the temptation to keep it an AMD-only feature, and given how well AMD's dev relations team have been doing recently I could quite easily see them essentially owning the PC gaming space by having their £100 GPUs outperform nvidia's £300+ GPUs in Mantle-enabled games...

http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-a...rformance.html

We've been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs. It should also make cross-development between PC and console games a lot easier, and also more incredible for those with a high-performance AMD GPU.

[MercutioUK]

This is a very good reason i'll only go for AMD GPUs. They innovate and become no.1 for GPUs quickly. Nvidia is going to need to go overtime with the 800 series next year to impress me and the world.

The closing statement of "From what we have learned thus far from snatched conversations, AMD, it seems, has gone down the same route as Nvidia in designing a card for single-GPU leadership. This means an architecture that relies on parallel width more than frequency." completely destroys what little merit your point had.

AMD have gone in the same direction as Nvidia with a wider bus on the card. It's also competition for the GTX780 (as far as this preview hints) rather than "no.1 quickly".

For this reason I buy whatever card offers the best priceerformance ratio. Being a fanboy gives you little obvious benefit. Being a fairly smart shopper means that better cards or better value for money keeps both camps competitive and everyone benefits.