Hardware AMD Radeon R9 280X, R9 270X and R7 260X Reviews

I smell Nvidia bias here, the 680 re-badge the 770 got 92% with a whopping 29/30 for value even at over £300 for a cheap 256 bit POS. Now we have the 3GB 7970 re-badge with a score of 85% and a lowly 23/30 for value even though the cheapest 280x can be had for £70 cheaper than a 770. I call BS.

 

it will be - it`ll come in at 7950 money

 

so £173?( which is the current price of a 7950 on scan today) If so that would make it the bargin of the century. I have my douts though. A direct $ to £ conversion puts it around £186 before vat mark btw. puts it at around the £220 mark with VAT. No $ price includes sales tax for those that are not aware of that.

 

The R9-290 GPU is a new one based on the GCN architecture but heavily tweaked and physically bigger (more transistors) on the same TSMC 28nm node. It is not a "rebrand" of an existing GPU.



AMD has a bit of a problem because TSMC has been a bit slow with their 20nm process. It is why Tahiti is 2 years old and going on 3. There is not much point doing a top->down refresh on the same node (28nm) if the tweaks don't result in much increased performance on their own. That is a lot of engineering effort (money) spent by AMD/partners for not much return. R9-290 will get its performance increase with a die size increase, and bigger chips cost more to make.

Better to push down the current cards (which are cheap, mature and yielding in good numbers) to lower price points, which results in the R9-280/270/260. Sucks for us enthusiasts looking for the new high performance products (what are we to do if we aren't able to shove a rocket up TSMC's backside?), but it is good for those looking for price/performance products.

Nvidia is in the same boat, hence the 6xx->7xx rebrands and the lack of new products until the end of 2014 when 20nm is available. Everybody is in a holding pattern until 20nm, while the engineering side works on behind the scenes.

Latest ETA on TSMC 20nm is for volume production to start February 2014 for the first fab and May for follow on phases, but no doubt initial yields will be so appalling that we won't be seeing production of large chips (like GPUs) until well into 2H 2014 when the process is a bit more mature.

If you can afford to wait a year, you'd be better off waiting for the faster cards packing more Oomph for less Juice. If you are looking for a replacement now, then I'm sure there will be good deals to be had on the R9-2xx or GTX7xx.

The stifling effect of last-gen consoles on game performance has meant that I'm now over worrying about what number the sticker on my GPU says. I care only about performance at the moment I play, and lately I've been playing games on my low power MITX system that has an HD7750 rather than my main system. Which sucks because that is a high-end system going to waste!

 

Btw if someone is looking for CF in the future, a 7950-7970 can CF with an R9 280X is seems (there are post from other websites that tried it today)

 

Yep. My 660 Ti still works out just fine. Moving along...

 

2yrs for them to come up with a re branding exercise....derp.

 

Except for the GTX780, the whole NVidia 7xx series is re-branding too.

 

Only the 770 was a rebrand.

I want to see the R9 290 and it's UK launch price. I'm concerned nvidia has poisoned the water for us by setting 780's price at £500+, and I'm just beginning to wonder if AMD will go the same way if the 290's performance is comparable. Not that it will immediately matter to me, as I plan to keep my 670 for at least another year - neither of the launches have wowed me or made me question my decision to buy my (now 13 months old) card.

 

..which just goes to show what an utterly boring and predictable space both the GPU & CPU market have become.

Nothing but cynical smoke & mirror re brands and lazy 5% performance boost's.

The whole situation sucks....ZZZZzzzzz

 

The GTX760 is also a GK104 based card, like the GeForce GTX 690, 680, 670, 660 Ti ... and GTX 770

 

At least AMD rebranding means that previous series is cheaper and better value for money

 

Based on the same GK104 GPU yes. That does not make it a rebrand. Upping the clock speeds on the 680 and calling it a 770 is a rebrand.

The spec list on the 760 is different to that of the 670.

 

It still should be called a GTX 665 Ti. Those mix of old and new gen chip is very confusing for the customer. You think you're buying the new generation, but you're just buying rebranded / rearranged / tweaked previous gen.

It's even worse with NVidia GT cards that can be 2 generation old (see GT630 and GT620 that are rebrand of fermi GT430). I've seen GT640's with GDDR5 (instead of the classic DDR3) ... you'd say "Cool", but if you look closely they use 64bit memory bus instead of 128 .... that's really misleading.

 

The 1st game to have mantle implemented on it is BF4 ....which is out in a couple of years! lol

 

Bf4 does not launch with mantle for the record will come as a patch at a later date.

 

Yeah, in December is what they're saying atm.

 

gtx 760 is a gtx 670 with higher clocks and 1 less TMU

 

Seem a retailer has let slip the specs of the R9 290/290X
http://videocardz.com/46407/amd-radeon-r9-290x-290x-specifications-confirmed-leaked-slide