AMD > Nividia

My I introduce the AMD Radeon R9 290X!

AMD my heroes of the computer hardware industry have done it again. They have released a product to knock the competitors into a tornado and they have no clue how to escape.

 

AMD has released there new GPU. I mean it! It's actually a new GPU. Many of their older graphics cards where just rehashed hardware (such as R9 280X = HD7970). This on the other hand is loaded with state of the art (not totally new technology but you know what I mean) Hawaii XT GPU. 

Nivida has been in the lead for a long time in terms of top of the line performance. Of course most people don't have the money for the absolute best performance. There are so many other markets to appeal to. For instance if someone was look for a quite PC and wanted to do a lot of video editing than this card may pose some problems. I'll elaborate on that in a moment.

Price for performance has always been AMD's lead in the market but with Nividia's Titan it's difficult to match top performance. Now we somehow from the wizards of AMD engineering we have awoken the blazing power of the R9 290X. Its architecture has had a noticeable improvement from the last GPU in first place. We are now looking at a spanking 2,816 cores, instead of 2,048 cores like was seen in the R9 280X.

AMD has been working on Mantle. It's supposed to be a low level API that allows developers the chance to create software that can take a greater advantage of hardware their GPUs can produce. It will make it's entrance into the market in a patch for Battlefield 4 (which clearly has enough traction already). This will be giving DirectX a run for it's moeny. Long has Nividia controlled the software market by having this ability for games to be more integrated into their products allowing for more stream line experience. AMD are at it too. With this kind of competition we are more likely to see less of a monopoly on the industry and a reason for these big companies to give us the consumers something better (to make us stray from the competitor).

Blazing as I stated before. This card has a lot more tech shoved into it but it doesn't preform without any issues. The machine is apparently supposed to run fine at a temperature of 95ºC. AMD states it will run fine and can run at different temperatures based on the amount of performance you are trying to dish out of this machine. The most attainable performance at a safe temperature is 95ºC. This is 'safe temperature' for the graphics card itself. There is a need to realize that the other components of the PC are a somewhat of a risk taking on that much heat. 

As well it will get rather noisy. This is what I mean by issues for other types of users who aren't in it for the games but perhaps are recording and editing audio. The noise is quite a big deal. As a result one might have to adopt a new cooling system and case fro sound proofing. 

Now some of these issues may seem like a deterrent but realize the price. AMD as I stated prior is always got Nividia beat when it comes to price for performance. It is being released at a price of 550 US dollars. Now compare that to the Nivida's counterpart which is a grand.

When testing the two behemoths, 

"in my graphics benchmarks, with the Titan at stock speeds and the R9 290X in ‘Über mode’, the Radeon card wins four out of the six tests. That’s pretty convincing, especially when you take into account the wins in the minimum frame rates too."

PCGamer stated in their review of the machine.

It may not be the best of all time but it's certainly high up. Depending on what money you have there is a lot to consider based on this new hardware. Since it is much less pricey than the competitor it still requires some possible noise dampening and some cooling for a less stressful performance for many people. I would recommend it over the Titan of course because I am sane or at least enough to say that.