picture courtesy of legitreviews.com
Nvidia has now been the uncontested high end market champion in GPUs for almost a full year. AMD hasn’t offered anything near the same high end price point, nor anything that could really compete performance wise.
That is until now… AMD has just launched the R7 and R9 graphics cards, based off a new architecture, it provides some great new cards. The R9 290x was reviewed on Toms Hardware, and it looks like AMD has their cross-hairs aimed right at the throne of ultra-high end graphics cards.
One of the biggest new innovations in the R9 290x is the increased memory and redesigned controller. This allows for a massive increase in the GPUs capacity to create the geometries on the screen, and as a result increase the performance of the card.
Another big innovation is the loss of the connector required for crossfire functionality. Now that we are in the age of Ultra HD and people running extremely high resolutions on their computer, the crossfire bridge was becoming a hindrance at the higher resolutions. Instead the GPUs will now be communicating across the PCI Express bus. PCI Express offers a high bandwidth rate, and therefore does not limit at the higher resolutions. This means big benefits for anyone playing at the highest ratings.
AMD has also included a new audio processor on to their R9 290x. The idea behind doing this is too utilize the power of the GPU to process information extremely quickly, and to let the CPU work on more important processes. This means better audio, and better performance. Seems like a win-win situation to me.
When Toms Hardware ran through the benchmarks, it shows the R9 29x to beat out it’s primary competition, Nvidias 780x boards. Although the R9 isn’t the best of the best, it’s price tag reflects that. It’s a good board at a price that is at least a bit affordable.
To see benchmarks and read the Toms Hardware review follow the link!
uDream Digital 