News - AMD not cutting the price of Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X GPUs

[ZaO]

I'm pretty much crying for Amd lol... I'm going to do some kind of rain dance for them! But seriously. I think they'll be alright with the graphics cards (not so sure about the Cpu's at this point). It's a back and forth battle between Amd and Nvidia that I've been watching for years now. Sometimes one of them comes out with something that makes them look a lot stronger, then the other side does it, and so on.. Bang for buck is often a strong part of the Amd selling point. So these price drops seem natural (to me at least), even if it's not Amd that chose to do it. I can't say I'm aware of who's made all of the similar decisions to adjust prices in the past..

[Pleiades]

Leads to me wonder if Christmas will see me getting a 290 to pair with my existing 7970, or whether to go the whole hog and get a cheap 290X

Don't think you can Xfire 290 with previous gens Crossy. Best to get a cheap 280X (7970) while they are still available if you're going down that route (lots on eBay now of course, around the £100+ mark). I think the pair will still outperform a single 290X.

[tribaljet]

Don't think you can Xfire 290 with previous gens Crossy. Best to get a cheap 280X (7970) while they are still available if you're going down that route (lots on eBay now of course, around the £100+ mark). I think the pair will still outperform a single 290X.

This. The R9 280X can be crossfired, 290's can't.

[anselhelm]

Bad move. AMD needs to react quickly to such situations, as it's very much behind Nvidia here. (I'm not an Nvidiot -- an Nvidia zealot -- just to be clear here.)


Edit:

If anyone wants to track price drops on Amazon.co.uk, check out:
http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/

It's a site dedicated to tracking price changes in items on Amazon UK.

[Pisthetaerus]

Smart move AMD, deny that you've taken the right move. The current price cuts aren't even really providing much competition vs Nvidia since 700 series card prices are dropping too.

[Pisthetaerus]

nVidia have done a great job with Maxwell, that no-one is denying, but we've not seen AMDs counter yet, all we've got are the previous gen chips such as the 290/x which retailers are now cutting to clear out. They've still got another round on 28nm in answer to Maxwell. Will it be as good? We've yet to find out.

The only thing you can't say is that there are inherent weaknesses to either manufacturer - the 480 was much much toastier than it's peers, and I had a geforce 6800GT that was a super card, quite happily running straight up to it's max temp or 90 or 100C or something and sitting there stable as pie. Does that mean nVidia cards are inefficient? Not in the slightest. And while great now, Maxwell will be seen as power hungry and slow in the future.

The problem is that AMD has kind of blown it on the price to performance competition for the last couple years. The 7000 series eventually competed with the 600 series but the Rx series lost a lot of ground they could have gained with gamers on the 290's price to performance due to price gouging during the lite coin mining craze.

[kalniel]

The problem is that AMD has kind of blown it on the price to performance competition for the last couple years. The 7000 series eventually competed with the 600 series but the Rx series lost a lot of ground they could have gained with gamers on the 290's price to performance due to price gouging during the lite coin mining craze.

That wasn't AMD. AMD priced the 270, 280 etc really well - much cheaper than the 7000 equivalents were.. then they got bought up and retailers put up prices. Not much AMD can do about that.

[ZaO]

Bad move. AMD needs to react quickly to such situations, as it's very much behind Nvidia here. (I'm not an Nvidiot -- an Nvidia zealot -- just to be clear here.)


Edit:

If anyone wants to track price drops on Amazon.co.uk, check out:
http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/

It's a site dedicated to tracking price changes in items on Amazon UK.

An "Nvidiot". I've never heard that one before. Had me laughing proper haha...

[The Hand]

Bad move. AMD needs to react quickly to such situations, as it's very much behind Nvidia here. (I'm not an Nvidiot -- an Nvidia zealot -- just to be clear here.)


Edit:

If anyone wants to track price drops on Amazon.co.uk, check out:
http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/

It's a site dedicated to tracking price changes in items on Amazon UK.

Thanks for the camelcamelcamel link.. I found a r9 280 3gb for £129 on amazon!

[robb213]

AMD is still having pretty bad frame pacing issues

Not according to PCPER who developed FCAT with Nvidia. Plus looking on OcUK,plenty of people over there own concurrent SLI and Crossfire rigs. I don't get the impression of what you are saying from them,and outside the odd issue with one or two games,I don't agree with you.

I also had both GTX660 and a pre-overclocked HD7850 myself - I didn't see any of these so called stuttering issues after trying out both. The GTX660 was a bit faster in pure FPS but its a faster card anyway.

Mantle has many short comings too. I wouldn't say it's a failure yet because there's far too little it's been used in, but it's not all they've made it to be--the saving grace of performance. When you're not using a lower end CPU, why would anyone care anyways about low-CPU overhead so much when it may not even add a frame to the average performance? But for lower ends, yes, it's a God send.

You mean like the people on OcUK and other forums,who have been able to run BF4 MP with older Intel and AMD CPUs with lower latencies??

Maybe you need to check out all the benchmark threads over on there??

Its a fallacy that Mantle needs a very high end card to work with and this has been known for a while.



Not every one is running overclocked Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs. The world is not hardware enthusiast forums when it comes to the sort of hardware gamers are usually packing.

It's hard Modifying quotes on a phone so I'll number my points.

1) Last I recall from tests spanning TomsHardware, Techspot, Anandtech, etc they were still having frame pacing issues for mGPU. Are you talking about single GPU configurations? Afaik frame pacing isn't an issue there as its never been a problem there. I'll admit it's been awhile since I checked out results for it and probably new drivers have made vast improvements.

2) You reiterated my point in Mantle where I said it's a God send for lower end CPUs. I never mentioned what kind of GPU was needed, but that early marketing was extremely misleading. Anyways, anyone of course will benefit much more from a higher end GPU due to the reduced bottleneck caused by the CPU. Of course it isn't needed though for acceptable results. I won't say it's a failure or success until it's more widely adopted if that's what you're getting at, as 3 games isn't much; I expect by this time next year with more games it'll be better to gauge the long-run. It definitely has given Microsoft a kick in the rump though to make them realize they've been dropping the ball which I am thankful for.

[Pisthetaerus]

The problem is that AMD has kind of blown it on the price to performance competition for the last couple years. The 7000 series eventually competed with the 600 series but the Rx series lost a lot of ground they could have gained with gamers on the 290's price to performance due to price gouging during the lite coin mining craze.

That wasn't AMD. AMD priced the 270, 280 etc really well - much cheaper than the 7000 equivalents were.. then they got bought up and retailers put up prices. Not much AMD can do about that.

Actually, they could have not blown it on supply. Any idiot could have told you that crypto currency miners would buy efficient cards with a good msrp in bulk.

[Pisthetaerus]

2) You reiterated my point in Mantle where I said it's a God send for lower end CPUs. I never mentioned what kind of GPU was needed, but that early marketing was extremely misleading. Anyways, anyone of course will benefit much more from a higher end GPU due to the reduced bottleneck caused by the CPU. Of course it isn't needed though for acceptable results. I won't say it's a failure or success until it's more widely adopted if that's what you're getting at, as 3 games isn't much; I expect by this time next year with more games it'll be better to gauge the long-run. It definitely has given Microsoft a kick in the rump though to make them realize they've been dropping the ball which I am thankful for.

It seems like that's all amd can do. They're always behind other companies because their solutions are reliant on garnering dev/manufacturer support when they're already late to the party.

Look at G sync, if Nvidia develops an ASIC and drops the price on it (a lot of the cost is because they're using an FPGA), who's going to bother waiting for free sync to be adopted by manufacturers? And in the mean time, enthusiasts can already get G sync now. Microsoft already has a huge marketshare with devs with DX so if DX12 delivers, who's going to give a crap about mantle?

[kalniel]

Look at G sync, if Nvidia develops an ASIC and drops the price on it (a lot of the cost is because they're using an FPGA), who's going to bother waiting for free sync to be adopted by manufacturers? And in the mean time, enthusiasts can already get G sync now. Microsoft already has a huge marketshare with devs with DX so if DX12 delivers, who's going to give a crap about mantle?

Haven't you just supplied the counter-arguements to yourself?

Case 1) G-sync first, AMD produce the later, but larger marketshare freesync.
Case 2) AMD mantle first, MS produce the later, larger marketshare DX12.

You can't say AMD are wrong, when they're doing both the things you suggest. If being first is important then they've won case 2. If marketshare is important then they've won case 1.

The only point you can take is that general statements like 'AMD are bad at.' or 'AMD are good at' are usually inaccurate and don't capture the details of the reality.

[DanceswithUnix]

Microsoft already has a huge marketshare with devs with DX so if DX12 delivers, who's going to give a crap about mantle?

If DX12 is Windows 10 only, and I am still on Windows 7 then I would care.

If DX12 *doesn't* deliver, then I would care.

If a game uses an engine that has both Mantle and DX12 support, then the DX12 support has to be better than Mantle or it won't be used, and I would care.

Life is big and complicated with a lot of ifs.

If by then I have completely switched to Linux, then I won't care either way.