I wanted to cut down on the page count of this story, so all of the re-run benchmarks are piling into one chart with three resolutions. Again, everything you see in the next seven pages is the product of heating every graphics card up prior to testing.

Right out of the gate, at 1920x1080, Radeon R9 290 jumps up alongside our press-sampled R9 290X at 1920x1080, 25601440, and the unplayable 3840x2160. Of course, achieving this requires a more aggressive 47% fan speed ceiling, which isn’t as bad as the 290X’s Uber mode, but still significantly louder than Quiet mode.
Meanwhile, the R9 290X we bought off the shelf starts under the $330 GeForce GTX 770 and $400 R9 290. Now you see why we’re making such a big deal about the variance between boards, right?
Fortunately for AMD, the shift to 2560x1440, where we’d expect these products to be used, shakes up the standings. The press-sampled R9 290 finishes in front of the GeForce GTX 780, and indeed the Titan as well. It continues to barely trail the 290X card we received from AMD, too. But then there’s the retail 290X, which manages to tie the $500 GeForce GTX 780, but loses to the 290 it should be beating.
By the time we hit 3840x2160, all of these cards are running too slowly for playable performance. You’d need to back Arma III off of its Ultra graphics quality setting—and after spending $3500 on a monitor, you aren’t going to want to do that.



The frame rate over time charts demonstrate just how close Radeon R9 290 and 290X come to each other—at least the cards we were sent by AMD. Our retail board is consistently in a different (lower) class.

Nvidia’s cards have an issue with Arma at 1920x1080—we cannot FCAT their results without a ton of frames getting inserted into the video output. Charted out, these insertions are what mess with worst-case frame time variance at that resolution.
At 2560x1440, every card drops back to very low variance, which is what we want to see to confirm that there’s little in the way of stuttering going on.
Stepping up to Ultra HD, however, frame rates drop so low, and the workload is so demanding, that variance between frames grows substantially.
- Digging Deeper Into Hawaii’s Behavior
- Sidebar: Variability Turns Into A Graphics Card Crapshoot
- Meet The Radeon R9 290
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: Arma III
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: BioShock Infinite
- Results: Crysis 3
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Results (DirectX): AutoCAD 2013 And Inventor
- Results (OpenGL): LightWave And Maya 2013
- Results (OpenCL): GPGPU Benchmarks
- Gaming Power Consumption Details
- Detailed Gaming Efficiency Results
- Power Consumption Overview
- Noise And Video Comparison
- Do-It-Yourself Upgrade With Arctic's Accelero Xtreme III
- Radeon R9 290: Priced Right Where We’d Peg It
http://techreport.com/review/25602/amd-radeon-r9-290-graphics-card-reviewed/9
Chris, these results differ drastically from real world results from 290X owners at OCN... I understand that your observations are anecdotal and based on a very small sample size but do you mind looking into this matter further because putting such a statement in bold in the conclusion even though it contradicts real world experiences of owners just provides a false assumption to the uninformed reader...
The above claim has already escalated further than it should... A Swiss site actually has already rebutted by testing their own press sample with a retail model and concluded the following:
In the quiet mode, where the dynamic frequencies to work overtime, the situation becomes slightly turbid. A minor performance difference can be seen in some titles, and even if it is not about considerable variations, the trend is clear. In the end, it does an average variance tion of only a few percent, ie no extreme levels. The reason may include slightly less contact with the cooler, or simply easy changing ambient temperature.
http://techreport.com/review/25602/amd-radeon-r9-290-graphics-card-reviewed/9
Chris, these results differ drastically from real world results from 290X owners at OCN... I understand that your observations are anecdotal and based on a very small sample size but do you mind looking into this matter further because putting such a statement in bold in the conclusion even though it contradicts real world experiences of owners just provides a false assumption to the uninformed reader...
The above claim has already escalated further than it should... A Swiss site actually has already rebutted by testing their own press sample with a retail model and concluded the following:
In the quiet mode, where the dynamic frequencies to work overtime, the situation becomes slightly turbid. A minor performance difference can be seen in some titles, and even if it is not about considerable variations, the trend is clear. In the end, it does an average variance tion of only a few percent, ie no extreme levels. The reason may include slightly less contact with the cooler, or simply easy changing ambient temperature.
Now to wait for the non-reference cards at the end of the month!
It looks like a good card for the price as it even keeps up with the $100 more GTX780. This is good as NVidia may drop prices even more which means we could also see a price drop on the 290X and I wouldn't mind a new 290X Toxic for sub $500.
Best to wait a month or two before buying to see how this all goes down
Some people who need CUDA for work and GPU for gaming will still get 780s, but no one will get 290x for $150 premium just to get a couple more FPS over 290. AMD just shot themselves in the foot before hurting nvidia.
Nvidia made a very good job with the reference cooler(but you really pay for it)... do you think AMD could not have pulled of a "monster" cooler?? is it really hard to make a good cooler? no, it is expensive.
You could do this, you have youre sources
Strange thing and I know some of us were going through this. I was thinking getting a 280x on Black Friday/Cyber Monday but the price tag is leaving me with something to think about. I think I'm just going to save up the few pennies to get something I thought was out of my price range ($300-450) a month ago ($650+).