Radeon R9-290X benchmarks give GTX Titan a run

AMD’s new flagship, the Radeon R9 290X has been benchmarked by a few websites already, and recent leaks from a new source confirm that the card will indeed be on par with, and perhaps faster than Nvidia’s GTX Titan.

The benchmarks come courtesy of TechpowerUp, who had a close source leak their results of testing an engineering sample Radeon R9 290X. The speeds of the card in question were 800MHz for the core and 4.5GHz for the memory, yielding 288GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Typically with engineering sample cards, these are underclocked in order to run the card through quality control tests and to validate features and the capability of the silicon. AMD itself said that the R9 290X had memory bandwidth exceeding 300GB/s, so the final version could be at least 10% faster than the results we’re seeing today.

The tests done by TechpowerUp’s source include benchmarks at 5760 x 1080 (Eyefinity with three 1080p monitors) and with a modified version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to demonstrate virtual memory usage. AMD may release a version of the R9 290X with 8GB of memory in the future.

The benchmarks suggest that the R9 290X is on par with the Titan in its current form, but suffers a few hiccups with the OpenGL-based RAGE, dropping frame rates when MSAA is enabled. The Tomb Raider chart is also a little dubious because the average frame rate for the GTX Titan with FXAA is listed as being lower than the minimum recorded rate.

In other benchmarks the R9 290X holds its own and shows almost no performance hit once MSAA is introduced, even though neither it nor the Titan can power Crysis 3 across three screens with maximum settings. Skyrim also shows some spikes with the Radeon’s scores and this can be attributed to it having less on-board memory, dipping into the system RAM or the page file and causing some stutter.

The source corroborated this theory by monitoring GPU RAM usage during the Skyrim benchmark. Notice how the modded game sits comfortably above 4GB in terms of memory use and nearly peaks at 6GB. Should AMD release an 8GB version of the R9 290X, the spikes would disappear and performance would improve.

AMD’s official NDA (non-disclosure agreement) ends on 15 October and reviewers will be able to reveal their testing results and more information on the card once that embargo lifts. The R9 290X is expected to ship with a retail price in the US of $599, undercutting the Geforce GTX780 and the Titan and forcing Nvidia into a price war.

Source: TechpowerUp