290X Vs 780 Ti Under Water Performance?

[Z15CAM]

No doubt Games that support Mantle will benefit AMD and Games with Physic-X will benefit nVidia and Games in between depending how there written will tend to favor one over the other.

I've read reviews reporting that the GTX 780 Ti with it's 3 GB Ram ran out of frame buffer playing Far Cry 3 in Ultra image quality 4K where the 290X had no issues.

There will always be benefits of one card over the other depending on the task involved but we really don't want to turn down the eye candy when one has spent the cash on a Flagship Card and a 4K monitor.

From all reviews I've read both cards are 4K Game Capable with not much difference between the two other then the 780 Ti tends to leads somewhat in Lower resolutions and the 290X tends to lead in higher resolutions.

It will be difficult to find an even playing field to accurately test and compare the brute force of the fastest Video Cards we have ever had to play with.

I have every confidence Forum Members here at Anandtech can do a better job when it comes to reviewing these cards, mainly because we are Honest and Not Sponsored - LOL

 

[zhuks]

I can run 1280 core and 1550 memory no problem 24/7 on water with my Sapphire 290x BF4 Edition without throttle. I am 100% certain I can go even higher if flashing the Asus bios with additional voltage control. The main thing I noticed is anything above 1500mhz on memory there is basically no performance gain. I have tried as high as 1600mhz and no visible gains.

 

[Face2Face]

I can run 1280 core and 1550 memory no problem 24/7 on water with my Sapphire 290x BF4 Edition without throttle. I am 100% certain I can go even higher if flashing the Asus bios with additional voltage control. The main thing I noticed is anything above 1500mhz on memory there is basically no performance gain. I have tried as high as 1600mhz and no visible gains.

Very nice :thumbsup: Share your Valley score here

 

[Z15CAM]

1280/1550 under water with a 290X - Now that looks promising - Lets see if we can do better ;o)

zhuks - DL and run MemoryInfo 1005.rar. It's a Stand alone EXE that reports the type of memory you have. Sapphire cards generally use Hynix but it could be Elpida on the Ref 290's. If so it may not respond beyond 1500 Mhz's but it seems Elpida has produced a higher quality vRam equivalent to Hynix modules for the Ref 290X. But you're right I don't see much benefit over 1550 Mhz on the memory with my Ref GA-R9 290X with Elpida vRam - Hoping the WB Solution may prove better and don't want to push the off-set voltage for any length of time until I'm under water.

This is what I've come up with in regards to the type of vRam used on Reference R9 290X's:

Sapphire R290X BF4 - SK Hynix
Sapphire R290 - Elpida
Asus R290X BF4 - SK Hynix
Gigabyte R290X BF4 - Elpida
AMD Press R290X - SK Hynix
MSI R290X BF4 - ???????
HIS R290X BF4 - Elpida
HIS R290 - Elpida
Power Color R90X - Hynix

You don't need the ASUS BIOS. Install amd_catalyst_13.11_betav9.5.exe with MSI Afterburner 300 b17 and use these CMD Commands to over-ride AB's optimum +100mv off-set at your RISK off course:

ROUTE to my MSI Afterburner Directory:
CD C: \Program Files (x86)\SYSTEM TOOLS\AMD Radeon R9 290X\MSI Afterburner

MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,20 ........... +200mv offset This gets HOT
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,19 ........... +156mv offset This seems to work BEST
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,18 ........... +150mv offset
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,17 ........... +144mv offset
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,16 ........... +138mv offset
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,14 ........... +125mv offset
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,12 ........... +113mv offset
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,10 ........... +100mv offset AB's Optimum Setting
MSIAfterburner.exe /wi4,30,8d,0 .............. Return to 0

These Cards appear to be able to take one H*^L of an Off-Set.

Let me point out that Card Mfgr's will never supply OC'g Software to go beyond the +100mv off-set in order to protect RMA's.

Run the CMD with AB closed - When you open AB you will see Core Voltage pegged at the off-set you assigned.
Set Power Limit to MAX.
Core Clock to whatever
Memory Clock to whatever
Fan Speed to Manual or Auto if you using a Profile
Apply

Minimize AB and OPEN GPU-Z with the Log Enabled and minimize.

Run your Bench

Running GPU-Z v0.7.4 during a Bench with log enabled records MHz, voltages and Temps. After the Bench, close GPU-Z, Open the log with Notepad and in there you can see what happened during the Bench and if there was any throttling. You will also see the MAX VDDC Voltage during the run - This will correspond to the Off-Set voltage you set in AB.

Oh Ya - One more thing ensure CCC\Performance\AMD Overdrive is DISABLED - It's Useless

 

[Will Robinson]

And true audio is the most cringe worthy eye rolling feature i've ever seen added to a GPU. Mantle is at least potentially interesting. True audio? Who cares...

Presumably you've tried True Audio and have one of the pre release game versions using it?
Otherwise you would be dismissing a new feature out of...spite?

 

[Slomo4shO]

My 4 290s which all unlocked to 290X and full custom loop with 5 radiators and dual D5 pumps still cost less than 4 reference 780 Ti...

 

[blackened23]

Presumably you've tried True Audio and have one of the pre release game versions using it?
Otherwise you would be dismissing a new feature out of...spite?

Positional audio is certainly nothing new and all discrete audio cards support it. That said, wake me up when Thief hits because then we might have a means to actually judge what it does.

I don't see it doing anything substantially different than what dolby surround, CMSS-3D or SBX surround do, these are things that discrete audio cards already do. I do believe that even most integrated Realtek chips on motherboards support dolby surround positional audio? I'm not convinced that trueaudio brings anything new to the table in that respect. But if it does, i'll be glad to read about it when Thief is released. I'm always willing to judge a new tech by it's own merits when possible, unfortunately it won't be possible for some time.

If you'd like to outline how true audio is different or better than industry standard positional audio - or even widely supported standards like SBX / dolby surround, i'm all eyes and ears. The way I see it is, true audio is proprietary and doesn't offer anything above and beyond the current standards. I could be wrong, though, we'll see when thief is released.

 

[Z15CAM]

Slomo4shO - You have one mean Crypto Miner there and could possible sell it for 3x's the price you paid for it or Mine to pay it off and make a profit that way. Either way you're lucky to have bought before this insane Cyber Gold Rush.

I consider myself fortunate for buying this Ref AMD GA-R9 290X for $549 from Newegg.CA 2 weeks ago as there is not one Retail R9 290/X card to be had in Canada to day.

 

[Teizo]

None of which do, and no known gameplay, performance, or any tangible; measurable info has been provided yet.

If you are already getting 90 fps in Direct X with a 290 or 290X, how is gaining 10fps or so from Mantle really going to deliver a better experience?

It's just hype. Mantle is best for lower powered cards. High end cards are already doing fine. Don't get me wrong...Mantle implementation will be good, but not in the way some are trying to promote.

 

[rtsurfer]

Positional audio is certainly nothing new and all discrete audio cards support it. That said, wake me up when Thief hits because then we might have a means to actually judge what it does.

I don't see it doing anything substantially different than what dolby surround, CMSS-3D or SBX surround do, these are things that discrete audio cards already do. I do believe that even most integrated Realtek chips on motherboards support dolby surround positional audio? I'm not convinced that trueaudio brings anything new to the table in that respect. But if it does, i'll be glad to read about it when Thief is released. I'm always willing to judge a new tech by it's own merits when possible, unfortunately it won't be possible for some time.

If you'd like to outline how true audio is different or better than industry standard positional audio - or even widely supported standards like SBX / dolby surround, i'm all eyes and ears. The way I see it is, true audio is proprietary and doesn't offer anything above and beyond the current standards. I could be wrong, though, we'll see when thief is released.

But you get True Audio built in for free with AMD cards.

It might not do anything new then a discrete card, but it does negate the need to spend money on a discrete card if it is good enough. That is the point.

As to how good it really is, we'll have to see with THIEF, because a lot of things end up underperforming in reality than on slides.

 

[Slomo4shO]

It's just hype. Mantle is best for lower powered cards. High end cards are already doing fine. Don't get me wrong...Mantle implementation will be good, but not in the way some are trying to promote.

Your argument is valid for 1080P and if mantel does provide dramatic performance increases then it can make the 780 Ti or 290X an absurdity for 1080P as you would be paying a hefty premium for marginal difference in FPS but not a noticeably better gaming experience. However, what single gpu high end card is capable of 80-90 FPS in a multi-monitor setup at max setting on demanding games? With 4K becoming available for ~$1k next year, I am sure that high end cards with mantel will etch out their own niche if one doesn't already exist.

 

[Teizo]

Your argument is valid for 1080P and if mantel does provide dramatic performance increases then it can make the 780 Ti or 290X an absurdity for 1080P as you would be paying a hefty premium for marginal difference in FPS but not a noticeably better gaming experience. However, what single gpu high end card is capable of 80-90 FPS in a multi-monitor setup at max setting on demanding games? With 4K becoming available for ~$1k next year, I am sure that high end cards with mantel will etch out their own niche if one doesn't already exist.

That is a good point. Single monitor set ups for high end cards maybe it won't be as dramatic a gain, but 10 more fps for multi-monitor can have an impact. The difference between 50-60 fps is more substantial.

 

[Headfoot]

Might be slightly OT, but along with that point, the dev slides from EA/DICE have been saying they may be able to get better multi-GPU scaling using Mantle than otherwise through a combination of decreased CPU load and ability to queue things manually. The scaling differential might tip the scales, given that 290/x scaling is already better than ever before for AMD. Not 100% sure but isn't current 2 GPU 290/x scaling pretty much equal to SLI on 780 ti? While I doubt Mantle will be groundbreaking for 2 GPU performance, I am a bit more optimistic that it may help in 3 to 4 GPU scaling as that is where "plug and play" (AFR, tiling) multi-gpu scaling techniques begin to lose efficiency. Take away here is Mantle *may* figure into your calculations if you are going 3-4 GPU route, depending on how much credence you give the DICE slides. It is my understanding that with Mantle you can explicitly code for multiple GPUs instead of simply making your rendering friendly to AFR/Tiling. The obvious counterpoint to this is that the consoles don't have multiple GPUs so this would have to be an added PC feature, instead of an easy port-over meaning that it is less likely to happen on a wide scale. However, you don't really lose anything because this only gives the potential to have greater-than-current CF scaling, which is already pretty good

TrueAudio is a complete unknown at this point. I wouldn't discount it so lightly as it might have some really cool features (especially if people can hack their way into using it for other things, ala LightBoost via 3D vision) but it could also be totally useless if no one adopts it (like literally every single other modern hardware audio API has been ignored). Last time I remember using hardware audio was in Doom 3. And it was awesome. But I admit I haven't been following the hardware accelerated audio gaming API scene for a number of years

I do a lot of music production/editing and if I could use the TrueAudio DSPs for real-time reverb effects etc to take load off of my CPU in complex arrangements that alone would be a huge selling point for me. And I don't think that use case is so far-fetched -- everything uses reverb and convolution based sound algorithms in professional audio now and they keep finding more ways to use it every day. Further, professional audio plugins can sell for hundreds of dollars. All it takes is one entrepreneur and this could get blasted open wide, at least in that market. Besides... if you've ever talked to an audio engineer you'll know they will go to somewhat absurd lengths to do things that they think sound 'more natural,' 'better,' 'cleaner' etc.

On the other hand G-Sync looks effing awesome, but realistically how often are you going to be lower than your monitor refresh rate on a heavily OC'd 780 Ti SLI? If you have, or plan to have, 120hz monitors or want to go 3d Vision then that might be a possibility

The last point you cant ignore in any 780/ti v. 290/x discussion is that the AMD cards are the best Litecoin mining cards and at least in the short term, will be able to make back some of their cost even with high electricty costs. That was the deciding factor in my last videocard purchase, and I've made a good bit of cash off of mining on it.

My personal opinion is that the features (G Sync v Mantle+TrueAudio) are basically a wash, all awesome sounding. Less expensive + makes you money back on the 290x sways me because of my more limited budget.

 

[Z15CAM]

When I titled this thread I never considered that Crypto Mining as being Performance issue; however, I did consider and common playing field where both cards have no advantage over the other for measuring "Brute Power". How does Unigine Valley or Heaven Benches fit into this scenario. Are the Unigine Benches considered none bias and considered an equal Playing Field?

I have to say every thread in this forum concerning AMD Cards have been Hi-Jacked about Crypto Mining and the lack of availability of AMD Cards and their insanely increasing prices in just under a week - I've never seen anything like this before. It's absolutely mind boggling and hard not to discuss.

 

[3DVagabond]

Positional audio is certainly nothing new and all discrete audio cards support it. That said, wake me up when Thief hits because then we might have a means to actually judge what it does.

I don't see it doing anything substantially different than what dolby surround, CMSS-3D or SBX surround do, these are things that discrete audio cards already do. I do believe that even most integrated Realtek chips on motherboards support dolby surround positional audio? I'm not convinced that trueaudio brings anything new to the table in that respect. But if it does, i'll be glad to read about it when Thief is released. I'm always willing to judge a new tech by it's own merits when possible, unfortunately it won't be possible for some time.

If you'd like to outline how true audio is different or better than industry standard positional audio - or even widely supported standards like SBX / dolby surround, i'm all eyes and ears. The way I see it is, true audio is proprietary and doesn't offer anything above and beyond the current standards. I could be wrong, though, we'll see when thief is released.

Dolby surround is not at all the same thing a Trueaudio. Neither is anything we find on any mobo or separate sound card. You need the massive parallel computing capability of the GPU to make Trueaudio work. Trueaudio is allowing for the 3D environment sound information to be individually programmed into massive numbers of discrete items in a game. We'll have to wait for it to experience it, but it's not like anything else we have now.

 

[Headfoot]

When I titled this thread I never considered that Crypto Mining as being Performance issue; however, I did consider and common playing field where both cards have no advantage over the other for measuring "Brute Power". How does Unigine Valley or Heaven Benches fit into this scenario. Are the Unigine Benches considered none bias and considered an equal Playing Field?

I have to say every thread in this forum concerning AMD Cards have been Hi-Jacked about Crypto Mining and the lack of availability of AMD Cards and their insanely increasing prices in just under a week - I've never seen anything like this before. It's absolutely mind boggling and hard not to discuss.

People seem to bring up mining even when it isn't relevant. How I see it though is when you are deciding between AMD and nVidia cards of comparable gaming performance then it can be the tie-breaker, along with price.

 

[Silverforce11]

I like my free R290 compared to a $500 780 or $750 Ti. If others don't seem to like $$, then sure, NV would make some sense. Thats why these threads pop up, because people do enjoy having $$ and not giving it away needlessly.

As for the water and VRM situation, I have to say this is the first reference design in a long long time from AMD that isn't "over-engineered" with a beefy PCB with much more power than needed. Here, it seems to be just "enough" and its the limiting factor to how high you can push the OC even on water with good temps.

 

[Z15CAM]

No doubt the R9 290/X are Great Cards from AMD - Beasts that need a little taming.

 

[Will Robinson]

Might be slightly OT, but along with that point, the dev slides from EA/DICE have been saying they may be able to get better multi-GPU scaling using Mantle than otherwise through a combination of decreased CPU load and ability to queue things manually. The scaling differential might tip the scales, given that 290/x scaling is already better than ever before for AMD. Not 100% sure but isn't current 2 GPU 290/x scaling pretty much equal to SLI on 780 ti? While I doubt Mantle will be groundbreaking for 2 GPU performance, I am a bit more optimistic that it may help in 3 to 4 GPU scaling as that is where "plug and play" (AFR, tiling) multi-gpu scaling techniques begin to lose efficiency. Take away here is Mantle *may* figure into your calculations if you are going 3-4 GPU route, depending on how much credence you give the DICE slides. It is my understanding that with Mantle you can explicitly code for multiple GPUs instead of simply making your rendering friendly to AFR/Tiling. The obvious counterpoint to this is that the consoles don't have multiple GPUs so this would have to be an added PC feature, instead of an easy port-over meaning that it is less likely to happen on a wide scale. However, you don't really lose anything because this only gives the potential to have greater-than-current CF scaling, which is already pretty good

TrueAudio is a complete unknown at this point. I wouldn't discount it so lightly as it might have some really cool features (especially if people can hack their way into using it for other things, ala LightBoost via 3D vision) but it could also be totally useless if no one adopts it (like literally every single other modern hardware audio API has been ignored). Last time I remember using hardware audio was in Doom 3. And it was awesome. But I admit I haven't been following the hardware accelerated audio gaming API scene for a number of years

I do a lot of music production/editing and if I could use the TrueAudio DSPs for real-time reverb effects etc to take load off of my CPU in complex arrangements that alone would be a huge selling point for me. And I don't think that use case is so far-fetched -- everything uses reverb and convolution based sound algorithms in professional audio now and they keep finding more ways to use it every day. Further, professional audio plugins can sell for hundreds of dollars. All it takes is one entrepreneur and this could get blasted open wide, at least in that market. Besides... if you've ever talked to an audio engineer you'll know they will go to somewhat absurd lengths to do things that they think sound 'more natural,' 'better,' 'cleaner' etc.

On the other hand G-Sync looks effing awesome, but realistically how often are you going to be lower than your monitor refresh rate on a heavily OC'd 780 Ti SLI? If you have, or plan to have, 120hz monitors or want to go 3d Vision then that might be a possibility

The last point you cant ignore in any 780/ti v. 290/x discussion is that the AMD cards are the best Litecoin mining cards and at least in the short term, will be able to make back some of their cost even with high electricty costs. That was the deciding factor in my last videocard purchase, and I've made a good bit of cash off of mining on it.

My personal opinion is that the features (G Sync v Mantle+TrueAudio) are basically a wash, all awesome sounding. Less expensive + makes you money back on the 290x sways me because of my more limited budget.

That's just an excellent post Head.
+1 :thumbsup:

 

[Will Robinson]

Positional audio is certainly nothing new and all discrete audio cards support it. That said, wake me up when Thief hits because then we might have a means to actually judge what it does.

I don't see it doing anything substantially different than what dolby surround, CMSS-3D or SBX surround do, these are things that discrete audio cards already do. I do believe that even most integrated Realtek chips on motherboards support dolby surround positional audio? I'm not convinced that trueaudio brings anything new to the table in that respect. But if it does, i'll be glad to read about it when Thief is released. I'm always willing to judge a new tech by it's own merits when possible, unfortunately it won't be possible for some time.

If you'd like to outline how true audio is different or better than industry standard positional audio - or even widely supported standards like SBX / dolby surround, i'm all eyes and ears. The way I see it is, true audio is proprietary and doesn't offer anything above and beyond the current standards. I could be wrong, though, we'll see when thief is released.

Except you do judge new tech by something other than its merits as evidenced by this statement:

And true audio is the most cringe worthy eye rolling feature i've ever seen added to a GPU.

You know as much about it as thousands of others around the world who have taken an interest in it.:hmm:
You would agree of course that any improvement in sound quality is a welcome feature on a new card ne?

 

[DigDog]

I do believe that even most integrated Realtek chips on motherboards support dolby surround positional audio?

yupp ...

 

[blackened23]

You know as much about it as thousands of others around the world who have taken an interest in it.:hmm:
You would agree of course that any improvement in sound quality is a welcome feature on a new card ne?

This is increasingly becoming off topic, so this is my last post on this. Improvement in sound quality. You hit the nail on the head so to speak, because that is exactly how I would judge it. So let's review. There was a true audio demo of lichdom, and it does absolutely nothing different than current positional 3d audio standards - so this begs the question, "what's the point?"

If you have an answer to "what's the point" please let me know, because integrated realtek audio has dolby surround and of course discrete audio solutions also have positional audio. Judging by the tech demos of true audio floating around, it isn't offering anything that everyone doesn't already have. Fact of the matter is, all desktops have integrated or discrete audio and 99% of these solutions offer surround sound via dolby surround, SBX or CMSS 3D. Now true audio makes sense for the consoles, so maybe AMD created it because of that. I don't know. But I think true audio makes sense for consoles, and not so much sense for PCs. Unless you have more information that i'm not aware of, that's how I see it...

 

[Elfear]

When I titled this thread I never considered that Crypto Mining as being Performance issue; however, I did consider and common playing field where both cards have no advantage over the other for measuring "Brute Power". How does Unigine Valley or Heaven Benches fit into this scenario. Are the Unigine Benches considered none bias and considered an equal Playing Field?

The Unigine benchmarks tend to favor Nvidia a bit. They're great for comparing cards from the same manufacturer but don't give a true perspective on real-world performance when you compare a red card and a green card.

 

[blackened23]

Spot on. Valley and 3dmark can't be compared beteween different architectures, because unigine (heaven, at least) favors NV while 3dmark firestrike heavily favors AMD by a large margin. And then there's 3dmark11 which heavily favors nvidia. This is why i've really favored actual gaming benchmarks for comparing max OC to max OC, because it's real world benchmarking - a few websites do these types of reviews. Most of them don't, however. (unfortunately).

I think LR, Linus, and H are tthree of the few that on occassion do include maximum OC'ed and aftermarket OC'ed cards in their reviews. It's valuable data because it gives direct comparison of overclocked real world performance, which isn't necessarily the case with valley, heaven or 3dmark. Don't get me wrong. All of those synthetics are valuable information. But don't always correlate 100% to real world.

 

[Face2Face]

Your about to see an awesome OC review from Elfear .... right buddy... No pressure