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[tweaktown] AMD cuts 290x by $150

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On new titles the radeons aren't far away performance wise. Those are fair prices
MordorVH_2560x1440_PER_0.png

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dogs-fps.gif

So just like Kepler before it, these maxwells need every bit of that OC headroom to separate themselves from the competition.
 
Surprising. The 290 & 290X are faster than the 970 & 980 respectively.

When is nvidia going to get it together on a proper SLI profile for this game ? Trying to use the nvidiainspector Fear 3 profile gives my system huge chugging and stuttering, so I have to run single gpu. Those graphs are deceptive because when you get into the midst of heavy fights with lots of orcs on screen the framerates are much lower than indicated there, generally down in the low 30s to mid 20s.
 
Grooveriding said:
Surprising. The 290 & 290X are faster than the 970 & 980 respectively.

When is nvidia going to get it together on a proper SLI profile for this game ? Trying to use the nvidiainspector Fear 3 profile gives my system huge chugging and stuttering, so I have to run single gpu. Those graphs are deceptive because when you get into the midst of heavy fights with lots of orcs on screen the framerates are much lower than indicated there, generally down in the low 30s to mid 20s.
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Those are single card charts. The competition for those automagically OCing Maxwells are stock 290/X (refrence models?).
 
Pia said:
One thing is for sure - it's a great time to be a consumer in the GPU market.
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No, it isn't. That the previous pricing structure was horrid does not make this great.

If you bought a 5850 five years ago for $259 you're still at the performance level of a $100 260X. Historical perspective? 4 years from 1998 to 2002 saw you go from a Voodoo 2 to the Radeon 9000 Pro. So something like 10x the performance (if you can even compare something that'll do 1600x1200 32 bit color to something that maxes out at 800x600 [1024x768 if SLI'ed] 16 bit) at 1/3rd the price.
 
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DominionSeraph said:
No, it isn't. That the previous pricing structure was horrid does not make this great.

If you bought a 5850 five years ago for $259 you're still at the performance level of a $100 260X. Historical perspective? 4 years from 1998 to 2002 saw you go from a Voodoo 2 to the Radeon 9000 Pro. So something like 10x the performance (if you can even compare something that'll do 1600x1200 32 bit color to something that maxes out at 800x600 [1024x768 if SLI'ed] 16 bit) at 1/3rd the price.
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you completely forgot the power consumption rose as well 10 times so nothing special...
 
You can only get away with huge power consumption and heat if your card is an ultra expensive top end one - as you need a big expensive case with v good cooling (water preferably), expensive psu, etc.

That's a big problem for 290 - it's not the sort of card you can drop prices and maintain sales. At $300 you are in a lower category of buyer who's cooling isn't so good, and psu's aren't so highly rated. They are thinking - will my case cooling and psu be good enough, will I need to buy a new psu to run it reliably, do I want that much heat? They'll obviously nearly all go for the 970 even if it costs a few $$$ more.

Hence I don't think even at reduced prices AMD will make many sales whatever they price the 290 at. AMD just needs a better architecture.
 
krumme said:
Nonsense. Amd loses a lot on big cores and apus not gfx and embedded. At the end its about marginal production cost. And for a 290 its even below 100usd. Clearly ther is more to it but we havnt remotely seen how low those old cards on 28nm can go. We will see in 5 months when 290 for sure is sub 250 and probably sub 200 before the new cards enter. Plenty of profit in it and far more than a new 390 for the few.
As for the complex pcb this is not 2006 any more. Its dirt cheap and so is eg high perf digital vrm. Slow 4g ddr5 comes cheap to. And 3 years after 3g entered! Lol. Things have been extremely slow evolving and both nv and amd have been milking the market for financing their failures in eg apu and tegra line.
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Where did you get this number from?
 
I think AMD nailed it with the 290. $299.99 for 10% less performance than GTX 970/290X sounds about right to me, specially when it's hard to find 970's at $329.99

Now, when it comes to the 290X, they really missed an opportunity. The card should be $329.99 since it matches GTX 970 in performance.
 
DominionSeraph said:
No, it isn't. That the previous pricing structure was horrid does not make this great.

If you bought a 5850 five years ago for $259 you're still at the performance level of a $100 260X. Historical perspective? 4 years from 1998 to 2002 saw you go from a Voodoo 2 to the Radeon 9000 Pro. So something like 10x the performance (if you can even compare something that'll do 1600x1200 32 bit color to something that maxes out at 800x600 [1024x768 if SLI'ed] 16 bit) at 1/3rd the price.
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If you are only looking at raw performance, and your frame of reference is the ancient times when GPUs were immature technology and explosive progress was not only possible but expected, I doubt you'll ever again consider the GPU market to be in a great place. I'm going with more realistic expectations and looking at more factors.

Look at the 970. It's a well balanced piece of hardware that simultaneously provides a nice jump both in price/performance and power/performance compared to what we had before, and is not pricy in absolute terms. It conforms quite well to standard APIs and virtually any game will run properly on it. The feature set, with stuff like the new programmable sampling features and HDMI 2.0, is a large jump forward and there is no indication of new features emerging any time soon which would obsolete the card in a significant way. Furthermore, there will not be new high end game consoles for many years to come, so requirements aren't going to jump drastically. Buying a GPU like this today is essentially risk-free, it will have huge staying power, and the total package is much better than what you'd have gotten for the same money six months ago. I don't see how this can be called anything but great for the buyer.

You can't actually say a lot of those things about the 1998-2002 period. Performance progress was very fast, yes, but various incompatibility problems were all over the place, and you ran the risk of buying a GPU that would be made nearly obsolete next week by the announcement of a new one.
 
Leadbox said:
On new titles the radeons aren't far away performance wise. Those are fair prices
MordorVH_2560x1440_PER_0.png

MordorU_2560x1440_PER_0.png

MordorVH_3840x2160_PER_0.png

dogs-fps.gif

So just like Kepler before it, these maxwells need every bit of that OC headroom to separate themselves from the competition.
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the R9 290 series cards performance in shadow of mordor and watch dogs is impressive given the fact these are TWIMTBP titles. Both these cards are still excellent performers at 4k.
 
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Interesting that FPS monitoring shows garbage meanwhile the card is outputting perfection. It's a minor issue but it's something that generates bad word of mouth, AMD should fix that ASAP. Not everyone has the same setup that PCPer has, and can call out software bugs like that.
 
Grooveriding said:
Surprising. The 290 & 290X are faster than the 970 & 980 respectively.

When is nvidia going to get it together on a proper SLI profile for this game ? Trying to use the nvidiainspector Fear 3 profile gives my system huge chugging and stuttering, so I have to run single gpu. Those graphs are deceptive because when you get into the midst of heavy fights with lots of orcs on screen the framerates are much lower than indicated there, generally down in the low 30s to mid 20s.
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Single card is ~5-10% faster for R290X vs 980 and R290 vs 970. Currently game does not support SLI/CF and tweaks to get it to run often have bugs.

This is really surprising since its a AAA title, so far winning all the awards too. May well end up as GotY, so hopefully NV/AMD get those multi-gpu support in ASAP (it's a NV game too with the logo and gameworks, how is it possible for them to launch without SLI?!).
 
Yup. I also wish a significant number of review sites had not dropped 780/780ti/Titan from their benchmarks. I think this may be a title like Crysis 3 where 780ti is faster than 980 and there are no reviews to investigate this.

I get that they've EOL the two cards but the absolute performance improvement delivered by 980 is so insignificant that you'd think they would still bench them. The reviewers who have dropped them are still using 770s in their bench suites as well. I expecty they'll drop the 770 too once the 960 comes out. Such an oddball GPU release, performance basically hasn't changed, just the name of the card. 😀
 
Wait, this Shadow of Mordor game is a AAA title, possible GOTY? Honestly, I had never heard of it before the post here about it needing 6GB for ultra. I might have to take a look at it...

Edit - Not my type of game... :\
 
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Keysplayr said:
Where did you get this number from?
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With a 21*21mm die (441mm2) you get aprox 126 DPW. At this late time in 28nm history, using 290 for binning, i would say its safe there is at least 110 working dies. With a wafer price of 2000usd (IDC numbers - its probably a good deal lower now - probably 1500usd, down from 4-5k initially at 7970 launch), we are in 18usd per die. Its a rough estimate and without packing. But its probably a number to the high side. The rest of the marginal cost for BOM is easily within the 100usd, as they can use cheap ddr5.

Lot of colorfull capacitors and so called high-tech cooling solution, cant hide the basic fact that there is tons of headroom to lower prices this late in the game. 290 is old beefed up 7970 tech, unlike 970/980. It means its depreciated a lot, and you can lower prices far more.

Its the same history for 770 that probably have a third less cost to build.
 
Are there any good 3-way benchmarks? I want to buy HW-E platform and I'm thinking about going with 3 cards and with 3 cards Radeons might be better. Ideally I'd like to see a comparison between 3xGK110, 3xMaxwell and 3x290X or any scaling comparison. I'd like to know if Maxwell scales better than kepler and how it compares to Radeons. I wouldn't be surprised if 3x290X were competitive with 3x980.
 
I may be wrong but I thought SLI was only 2 way or 4 way.

I am also interested in a three-way setup though. Considering grabbing a 280x to go with my two 7970s.
 
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