AMD Radeon R9 Series Performance Examined

AMD Radeon R9 Series Examined

The new AMD Radeon R9 and R7 series were launched in late September this year with much fanfare. For AMD fans expecting the Radeon 8000 series, it appeared the company decide to embark on a different path, in order to signify their commitment "to bring about a more immersive gaming experience."

At the initial launch, the members of the higher end R9 series consisted of the 290X, 290, 280 and 270X. The 270 was recently added to this series in mid November. On the other hand, the R7 series is reserved for casual PC gamers who don't happen to own high-end PC components. In addition to launching the new GPUs, AMD also took the opportunity to introduce their new initiatives like the updated AMD PowerTune technology and Project Mantle. The new PowerTune takes into consideration operational factors like fan operation, temperature and power draw as it attempts to optimize the GPU core's performance. Project Mantle is the new programming API that will allow game developers "tap into the hardware capabilities of AMD's GCN-based GPUs and unleash the full performance potential of the GPU in an efficient manner." The former is applicable only on the new R9 290 series (due to the new Hawaii core), while the latter technology is supported across the R9 and R7 series.

There is also the new AMD TrueAudio technology; however, it is currently only supported by three GPUs; the R9 290X, R9 290, and the R7 260X. AMD TrueAudio incorporates a fully programmable audio engine as part of the GPU die. This is to allow for accurate real-time positional audio rendered, and at the same time, have the capabilities to process several streams and voices simultaneously for creating a realistic gaming atmosphere. Since the new audio engines is on the GPU die, the host CPU is free up from this computational taxing tasks. In line of promising a more immersive gaming experience, AMD has also expounded on the visual benefits of 4K gaming, however, only the R9 290X has the required graphic compute throughput to drive a 4K display in gaming. 

In terms of new GPU architecture, only each of the two 290 series GPU cores has an updated one, codenamed "Hawaii". Most of the other GPUs pretty much rehash existing graphics cores from the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series. However, for the R7 260X, despite its core being based on the old Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, it sports a new ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), enabling it to support the new TrueAudio technology for the mainstream gamers.

As you can see, while AMD is launching the entire Radeon R9 and R7 series as a bid to refresh their offerings, there are so many nuances between the lineup that may well lead to some confusion as to what's really new, even for diehard AMD fans. As such, we'll take a closer look at the members of the Radeon R9 series to clear up any uncertainties and how the 'new' AMD Radeon R9 competes against the established NVIDIA GeForce 700 sereies

AMD "Hawaii" Graphics Core (Radeon R9 290X and R9 290)

Despite the fact that the both R9 and R7 series were announced on the beautiful tropical island of Hawaii, only the R9 290X and 290 graphics core can lay claim to the fact that they share the same moniker as the island. The Radeon R9 290 series is indeed completely a brand offering from AMD.

The Hawaii core features an improved GCN architecture that is still based on the 28nm fabrication process, and the new core supports up to 44 GCN compute units. This is in comparison with the 32 compute units of the previous generation top-end Radeon HD 7970. At the same time, both R9 290X and 290 cards sport an ultra wide 512-bit memory bus, increasing their memory bandwidths to a theoretical ceiling of 320GB/s. With reference to the table above, the differences between the two R9 290 GPUs are in the number of texture mapping units and stream processors. This difference is directly a result of the number of compute units enabled in each of their stream engines (there's a total of four on each GPU). The R9 290X sports 11 compute units per stream engine for a total of 44 compute units. The R9 290, on the other hand, has 40 compute units. On the surface, especially in the form of their respective reference cards, they look almost identical.

To some extent, you'll also find that both the Radeon R9 290 GPUs rank similarly in our test segment as there's not a whole lot differentiating them. This is despite their wide price differential (US$549 vs. US$399) that might suggest to consumers that the R9 290X is far superior product. Would this mean the Radeon R9 290 is a value enthusiast's best friend? We'll fill you in on those details at the end of the article along with how it goes up against the GeForce GTX 780 series that it competes with.

There are a few other notes about the new R9 290 series, so we'll finish explaining those bits first. The R9 290X card has dual BIOSes. There is a BIOS switch at the top, which toggles between two modes; quiet mode and uber mode.

In quiet mode, acoustics take center-stage as the card's performance is primed so as not to create too much additional noise. In uber mode, the card will perform optimally, and this mode is recommend for AMD CrossFire configuration. During our testing, the R9 290X card was in uber mode. The R9 290 card has the same BIOS switch; however, it toggles between two set of BIOSes, where one functions as a backup to the main BIOS. This card doesn't feature the acoustic-tuning function, unlike the R9 290X.

In terms of video connectivity options, each card offers two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort output. Discounting the presence of the DisplayPort port, this new arrangement allows for 3x DVI/HMDI connections simultaneously. This allows you to connect to a multitude of monitors readily as compared to more restrictive dual combination of DVI/HDMI of the previous generation of Radeon HD 7000 series. DisplayPort will of course help you expand your options further (the GPU has six display controllers onboard the GPU die), but DisplayPort-ready monitors are still fairly limited and require you to get costly adapters and cables for connectivity.

Radeon R9 280X - One Man Standing

The Radeon R9 280X is the odd man out as it doesn't have a vanilla R9 280 counterpart (yet). We didn't receive a reference card from AMD; instead, we fielded the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB GDDR5 as our representative. The card features a slightly overclocked Tahiti XT core, with 3GB of GDDR5 video memory rated at 6400MHz, a 7% increment over the default 6000MHz of the reference R9 280X.

As pointed out in our original review of this card and GPU, for all intents and purposes, it's identical to a Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition in terms of performance and expectations but given a new branding. Given the slight increase in clock speed of the ASUS edition, it's an ideal representative of a Radeon R9 280X and most custom edition variants that are in the market. Priced on average from US$299, AMD initially fielded this against the GeForce GTX 760 in its comparisons, but as we've come to know from testing, it's a much better fit to be compared against the GeForce GTX 770, but without the latter's hefty price tag. While the GeForce GTX 770 has recently revised its price down to US$329, it will take a long time before actual store prices reflect its updated standings. And even then, both cards are fairly well matched, but who's the better of them? You'll find out soon enough as we count down to the showdown on the last page.

Based on our earlier experience with the card, we felt it is an ideal option for those upgrading from two generations ago or older graphics cards, such as the Radeon HD 5000 or 6000 series. Read on to see how this and the rest of the Radeon R9 series compares with the green camp.

R9 270 Cards - Sub US$200 Offerings

Round up the Radeon R9 series are the R9 270 pair of cards featuring the Pitcairn XT core; this GPU first made its appearance in the Radeon HD 7800 series. For some reason, AMD has renamed the codename of the core to Curacao and there has been no official notice on what has changed, leading us to believe it's a name change for the sake of it. However, compared to the older series, the R9 270X sports a core with a slightly higher clock speed as it's purported to have a performance ceiling of 1050MHz, against the 1000GHz clock speed of the older Radeon HD 7870 GPU. The R9 270 is rated to perform lower, up to 925MHz. The newer R9 270 cards have speedier video memory modules, rated up to 5600MHz. They also have a more attractive SRPs at launch; the R9 270X is going for US$199, and the R9 270, US$179.

From a performance standpoint, we expect the Radeon R9 270X to give the US$249 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 a good run for its money despite the fact AMD has chosen to officially compare against the older GeForce GTX 660. And while the plain jade Radeon R9 270 is meant to go up against the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, in this article we intend to check how the new 'performance class' Radeon R9 series ranks against the equivalent new 'performance class' GeForce GTX 700 models (and as such we'll not be bringing in older cards for this comparison).

We managed to get the R9 270X reference card and its appearance is similar to the 290 cards; however, it doesn't come with the dual BIOS feature. At a glance, the card's length is slightly shorter than the R9 290 cards; therefore, it's possible to tell them apart from their physical appearances. In fact, it sports the same reference board length of 9.5 inches long as the old Radeon HD 7870.

The video connectivity options are made up of the usual, now familiar suspects of a pair of dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort ports. Like their 290 counterparts, they offer 3x DVI/HMDI connections simultaneously. With the DisplayPort port in use, the card can drive 4 displays simultaneously (or up to six with a DisplayPort MST hub).

The PowerColor R9 270 2GB GDDR5 OC stood in for our missing R9 270 reference card. According to PowerColor, its Pitcairn XT core has a base clock of 930MHz, and a boost clock of 955MHz. However, its memory modules operate at the default 5600MHz clock speed.

The video connectivity ports have been pared down with the removal of one DVI port. There is a single DVI-I port, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort port.

Test Setup

These are the specifications of our graphics testbed:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard
• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Below is the list of cards we'll be testing. We used the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP card to represent the R9 280X reference card; while the PowerColor R9 270 2GB GDDR5 OC stood in for the R9 270. Part of the resultset of the ASUS Radeon R9 280X card was obtained while the card was operating on the AMD Catalyst 13.9 drivers; the results from 3DMark, Crysis 3, and overclocking were obtained when the card's drivers were updated to AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 8. But that said, the differences are marginal, if any.

At the same time, we fielded the listed NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards; the GTX 780 Ti reference card was reviewed in early November. The other reference card included was the GTX Titan that was tested with updated drivers (ForceWare 331.65). The rest of the NVIDIA candidates were the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II 3GB GDDR5 that was clock down to the default operating values of the GeForce GTX 780 reference card. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 Windforce 3X OC was throttled down to represent a reference GTX 770; while the MSI GeForce GTX 760 Twin Frozr IV OC was used to represent the GTX 760.

• AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2)
• AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2)
• ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.9 / AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 8)
• AMD Radeon R9 270X 2GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2)
• PowerColor R9 270 2GB GDDR5 OC (AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.70)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 6GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.65)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.65)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.40 Beta)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.40 Beta)

Note:  The purpose of the article is not squarely an AMD vs. NVIDIA article, but more about how the new performance series from each side ranks. As such, even though we're aware that the plain jade Radeon R9 270 is meant to go up against the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, we intend to find out how the five new 'performance class' Radeon R9 series ranks against the equivalent five new 'performance class' GeForce GTX 700 models. As such, we'll not be bringing in older cards for this comparison.

Benchmarks

Here's the full list of benchmarks that we'll be using for our assessment:-

• Futuremark 3DMark 2013
• Crysis 3
• Unigine 4.0 "Heaven"
• Hitman: Absolution
• Far Cry 3

For our temperature and power consumption tests, 3DMark 2011 was used.

3DMark 2013 Results

3DMark 2013 is made up of a pair of tests, and they put graphics cards through their paces with extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination. Fire Strike is the first test and is designed for enthusiast-level graphics cards and dual-GPU setups; while the second, called Fire Strike Extreme, ramps up the difficulty with more tessellation, more particle effects and more taxing DirectCompute calculations.

The Radeon R9 290X turned in an impressive performance to show the strengths of the improved Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. When compared against the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, the R9 290X was trailing less than 1% behind the latest and fastest NVIDIA GPU. Looking at how the winning margin of the GTX 780 Ti narrowed at the more demanding Fire Strike Extreme test, this shows the direct benefits of having more compute units for the new "Hawaii" core. At the same time, with the increase in compute units for the new core, the supporting processing engines and blocks, as well as L2 cache, have increased in tandem with the total count of the compute units. The new 290X also has a wider memory bus interface of 512-bit, and its memory bandwidth has a theoretical ceiling of 320GB/s. However, it still falls slightly behind the memory bandwidth of the GTX 780 Ti, rated at 336GB/s.

Against the GTX Titan, the Radeon R9 290X managed to pull ahead for both tests. We can see the Radeon R9 290 faltering against the Titan; however that doesn't matter as the R9 290 has positioned itself ahead of the GTX 780 by an average margin that is slightly over 5%. As for the R9 280X, from our earlier experience with the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB GDDR5 card, we knew that it would outperform its directly NVIDIA competitor, in the form of the GTX 770.

The performances turned in by the 270X and 270 weren't impressive, but they've a far more compelling price point than the competing GeForce GTX 760. Given its circumstance, we think the Radeon R9 270 series are managing rather well, just losing out marginally to the more expensive GTX 760.

Crysis 3 Results

Crysis 3 is a graphically-taxing game title as its gameplay involves  extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, improved dynamic cloth and vegetation, dynamic caustics and diffuse shadows.

The results of the R9 cards were generally disappointing as it was clear that the NVIDIA GeForce 700 series were better. At the resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels and with anti-aliasing, the top three cards from NVIDIA churned out frame rates that were above 30fps; while only the R9 290X managed to scrap by with a score of 30.7fps. At the highest resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixles, it was evident that cards were heavily taxed by the game engine; however, it was still obvious that the NVIDIA cards were outperforming their AMD R9 counterparts.

It's also fairly apparent that AMD is missing a "Radeon R9 280" part and that the R9 270 series are mainstream performance cards that aren't cut out for the extremes presented in this benchmark. At this point of time, it seems that the GeForce GTX 760 is the minimum gamers should consider for their gaming rig if they are serious about gaming with a high level of detail and quality. Read on to see if this still holds true in other tests.

Unigine 4.0 "Heaven" Results

The Unigine 4.0 "Heaven" benchmark tests GPUs with extreme tessellation, dynamic sky with volumetric clouds, real-time global illumination, and screen-space ambient occlusion among others.

Far Cry 3 Results

Far Cry 3 features a modified version of Crytek's CryEngine, called Dunia 2. It offers heavy tessellation, high amounts of volumetric lighting, and deferred radiance transfer volumes (global illumination).

Hitman: Absolution Results

Hitman: Absolution runs on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier2 engine and this hardware-intensive engine is able to render up to 1200 NPCs simultaneously. Besides the massive crowd of NPCs, it also features Reflective Shadow Mapping (RSM), Direct Compute accelerated Bokeh Depth of Field, extreme tessellation and Ambient Occlusion.

Generally speaking, across the three gaming benchmarks, we can clearly witness the strong performances of the NVIDIA cards again. In most cases, the R9 cards were trailing behind - except in Hitman where both AMD and NVIDIA opponents performed quite competitively. The 290X and 290 GPUs, with their new Hawaii cores, only managed to edge out the GTX 780 on most occasions. We also noted the neck-to-neck performance of both R9 290 GPUs. At times, the R9 290 even outperformed the more powerful R9 290X. The ASUS R9 280X card, based on the previous generation Tahiti XT core, has middling performance as it ranked ahead of the GTX 770 in some test scenarios and also trailed it in other test scenarios.

The 270X and 270 were no match against the GTX 760 though the NVIDIA card's winning margin was rather marginal in general. Given their price point, it would seem that in these games, you would get a better deal from the Radeon R9 270 cards as they are much more affordable with hardly any perceptible loss in capability over the GTX 760. After all, at those performance levels, you're really looking out for good performance characteristics at the resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels or lower.

Temperature

To reiterate, in the current range of Radoen R9 GPUs, only the Radeon R9 290 series support the updated AMD PowerTune technology (also unofficially known as PowerTune 2.0). This newer version makes use of the card’s temperature, power consumption and voltage draw to determine how best to increase another attribute in order to maximize the hardware's performance. The default temperature target has been set at a high of 95 degrees Celsius, and fan noise is also considered as a factor for the new PowerTune feature. The rest of the series utilize more rudimentary PowerTune technology that's based on maximizing the available power budget to boost performance.

Unlike AMD, all the new NVIDIA cards support GPU Boost 2.0, which will boost the graphics core performance as long as it remains below a temperature and power threshold. The threshold has a default value of 80 degrees Celsius, and its value can be adjusted to further boost its performance. As a result, we can see the top three NVIDIA cards pushing at or near the 80 degrees Celsius mark. . The GTX 770 and GTX 760 cards ran slightly cooler at temperatures of 71 degrees Celsius and 65 degrees Celsius respectively since they are not top-end parts to put out a lot of heat. This also means the performance we've seen out of the NVIDIA cards can only get better if were to notch up the temperature threshold to match the AMD companions, but we pretty much like where they are now.

Though the default temperature for PowerTune is set at 95 degrees Celsius, the operating temperatures of the 290X and 290 hovered around below 90 degrees Celsius. This is where custom coolers of add-in card partners will come into play. On the other hand, it's also telling that the AMD GPU needs to pushed further in order to meet its rival's performance levels. One rank lower, we found the ASUS R9 280X card operated at a low 64 degrees Celsius. This is because the card features the proprietary DirectCU II cooling system. With the aid of its single fan cooling system, the PowerColor R9 270 card operated at just 62 degrees Celsius, a difference of 6 degrees Celsius when compared to the reference R9 270X. It also helped that the Powercolor card had a lower clock speed of 945MHz as compared to the recorded clock speed of 1050MHz of the R9 270X.

Another aspect that's not discussed as often is the tolerability of the reference cooler's fan. Across the board, we find NVIDIA's reference coolers markedly quieter than AMD's solutions. The after-market cooler options supplied by vendors in their custom edition cards improve this tremendously, but if someone were to opt for the cheaper reference models, then NVIDIA gets our nod. Most recently, we've made a note of this in our performance review of the top-end GeForce GTX 780 Ti over the AMD Radeon R9 290X.

Power Consumption

With the R9 290, our total system power draw was at an unexpected low of 401W, under load, and the power consumption profile of the R9 290X is similar to the GTX 780. To reiterate, power draw is also one of the factors taken into consideration by both the AMD PowerTune 2.0 and NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 technologies in order to optimize the performance of the cards. The top-end GTX 780 Ti even has a new power balancing technology that appeared to be working well; with its winning performance levels, its highest power draw of 432W is lower than the GTX Titan. The power draw of the ASUS R9 280X also mirrors its direct competitor, the GTX 770. Naturally, the weakest cards in this lineup, the R9 270X and R9 270, had the two lowest system power draws under load.

Overclocking

During our overclocking exercise, we were able to push the pair of 270 cards to their overclocked states by the highest margins. In terms of best performance gains, it was the R9 270X that managed an average of 11.8%, with its GPU core operating at 1185MHz, a gain of roughly 13% over its recorded default speed of 1050MHz; while its memory modules were overclocked to 6500MHz, a gain of 8% over its default 6000MHz .

We had high expectations for the R9 290 pair as our previous experience with the R9 290X demonstrated its strong performance, especially against the older NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 reference card. But it was the R9 290 that stole its thunder somewhat as it managed to garner an average overclocking performance gain of 9.6%, over the 9.3% gain of the R9 290X. The overclocked ASUS R9 280X also had similar performance gain in the range of 9- to 9.4%.

However, it was the green camp's NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti that stole the show has it garnered an average overclocking performance gain of 20%, more than half the performance margins of the R9 series. A good deal of this outcome can be attributed to the the GTX 780 Ti's new power balancing technology that allowed it to draw more juice from lesser used power rails and thus propel the card to greater heights.

Price-Performance Comparison

We decided to delve further by looking at the price-to-performance ratio for each card, in order to determine how much bang do you get for your buck.

For this comparison, we calculated the average FPS of each card, based on its sum total score across our gaming benchmarks, on one particular resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, with two different game settings. We also apply this criteria to a resultset from the Unigine 4.0 "Heaven" benchmark. Next, we divided the derived average FPS over the suggested retail price (USD), in order to get exactly what 1 US dollar will get you in terms of FPS for each card.

For the price of the ASUS R9 280X, its USD price was obtained from the AMD Shop. For the PowerColor card, we estimated its price (US$179) to be the same as the reference R9 270 card. This was because a R9 270X-based PowerColor card was retailing at the same price as the reference R9 270X. The prices of the NVIDIA card were estimated from information from the online retailer, Newegg.

Please bear in mind the chart above isn't indicative of which card is more powerful as it merely shows the relative worth of each card. It's best interpreted when you've a bunch of graphics cards that are on the same level of comparison. In addition, the prices are in US dollars, and local prices will be affected by the demand and availability of the cards.

For example, starting on the mainstream performance scale of things, the PowerColor R9 270 OC card took the top spot among all cards and is favorably positioned against the Radeon R9 270X and the GeForcre GTX 760. While in most tests, the performance advantage posed by the GeForce GTX 760 wasn't by a large margin, there are some tests such as Crysis 3 where the GTX 760 is clearly better positioned ahead. As such, if you're cash strapped, the Radeon R9 270 series is a good option, but if you need a certain minimum level of performance assurance, the GeForce GTX 760 gets our nod to handle a wider variety of situations. What's more, it has PhysX support (at least for the handful of games that still pursue this support).

On the next rung of comparison, the Radeon R9-280X would seem like an overall better option than the GeForce GTX 770, but the small difference in ratios also suggest little real world difference as seen in our individual test results. You could clearly opt for either option and you would be equally content. As such the Radeon R9-280X has a slight advantage here for its better price point.

Over on the top-tier of cards, the Radeon R9 290 is clearly the in the lead in terms of the price-performance comparison. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan in naturally outclassed as it's positioned as a workstation card for dual-precision floating point performance that just happens to double up well for gaming. And while the Radeon R9 290X seem like a better option over the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, that's only because of the massive premium that the top tier enthusiast card carries. For all intents and purposes, if you want the very best, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti delivers it well and beyond any other card by a large margin.

Conclusion

From the R9 series, we are most impressed with the R9 290. Despite the fact it has less stream processors, and texture mapping units than the R9 290X, it showed impressive performance levels across the board. This was especially evident during our gaming benchmarks. At the same time, it had an unexpected lower power draw profile, in comparison to the R9 290X. To top things off, its price-performance score was about 33% better.

With such positive feelings about the R9 290, we are definitely looking to forward to the potential of this GPU, especially when it is coupled with proprietary features of different add-in card manufacturers. As such, enthusiasts gamers may be able to stretch their budgets, while being able to enjoy the immersive gaming experience offered by graphically-taxing PC game titles.

While the R9 290X is reserved for the group of enthusiasts who demand the best performance levels out of the AMD camp without batting an eyelid at its premium price, it is currently too pricey to be worthy of our recommendation. What's more, the GeForce GTX 780 in some cases can rival and exceed its performance and offers a better overall price-performance ratio. For an even better bang for back option, we would point out to the R9 290 option that doesn't differ much, but it's a lot more affordable. As we noted earlier in for our gaming benchmarks, the performances of the R9 290 and R9 290X were very close; at times, the R9 290 even pulled slightly ahead. Looking forward, we feel that the performance difference between these two GPUs may widen in the future as more game developers choose to adopt AMD Mantle API. As more game engines use Mantle to fully tap into the the  hardware advantages of the GCN GPU architecture, the R9 290X may finally get to extend the full processing power of its Hawaii graphics core. However, until that comes about, it's just a positive outlook that's yet unproven.

However, the higher operating temperatures of the R9 290X and R9 290 cards may impede their adoption by end-consumers, but we are somewhat confident that the proprietary cooling systems of add-in card partners will bring their temperature levels down without creating too much acoustic disturbance.

The ASUS R9 280X, which we opined to be a good representative of a typical R9 280X-based card from add-in card partners, is the best choice from the R9 series for mainstream gamers who don't mind playing games at the resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, with top-end game quality settings. At higher display resolutions, gamers might experience video stutter and gaming lag. We feel the R9 280X is set to steal some market share from both the GTX 770. It also spells an ideal upgrade option for owners of existing Radeon 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards.

Despite their highest scores for the price-performance analysis, we hesitate to recommend the R9 270 group of graphics cards to any discerning gamer. They are meant for casual gamers who aren't necessarily playing the cutting-edge PC game titles or for system builders who don't have the necessary accompanying high-end PC components. The GeForce GTX 760 has better overall horsepower to tackle minimum expectation of budget gamers, but it comes at an added price.

On the whole, the latest offering of R9 series brings variety and value to the table, which addresses the gaming requirements of distinct segments of the PC gaming market. This is clearly seen in their performance levels, as well as their price-performance propositions. Despite the daunting lead of NVIDIA in some cases, AMD continues to build on its own offerings, bringing much needed alternatives to PC gamers and rig builders alike.

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