videocardzAMD Radeon R9 290X confirmed to feature 64 ROPs

[csbin]

http://videocardz.com/46571/amd-radeon-r9-290x-confirmed-feature-64-rops


The official presentation of Radeon R9 290 series, which was not supposed to be public for a week, has been leaked and found by WCCFtech.


AMD Radeon R9 290X

Just as I told you, the R9 290X will have 64 ROPs, which is confirmed by two slides with “2.0X Render Backend (ROPS)” information (in comparison to Tahiti). The R9 290X equipped with Hawaii XT processor will have 2816 Stream Processors and most likely 176 TMUs. We are looking at 4GB GDDR5 memory across 512-bit interface. The GPU is clocked somewhere at 1GHz, although it will depend on few factors (I heard the clock is around 950-970 MHz in the actual gaming scenario).
AMD Radeon R9 290

The cheaper variant of Hawaii GPU will have 2516 Stream Processors. The R9 290 will also have 64 ROPs. This card is expected to have a performance of GTX 780, but for that we will have to wait for proper reviews. This card is also clocked lower than R9 290X — 947 MHz. The rest didn’t change much, so we still have 4GB GDDR5 memory and 512-bit memory bus.
Both cards are equipped with 6+8-pin power connectors, unfortunately power draw is still a mystery. Also both cards have memory clocked at 5GHz, which with 512-bit interfaces results in a bandwidth of 320 GB/s.
AMD did a lot of work with the new CrossFire technology, which will now be handled by PCI-E slots rather than separate CrossFire connectors. This approach will most likely fix most of the frame pacing problems for AMD cards, although this is not entirely true for sub-290 cards (which are just rebrands).
In dual-CrossFire you should expect at least 1.87X scaling, which is already a good number. In 3-way CrossFire the scaling will be around 2.6X, so it does prove that AMD focused on CrossFire a lot. Although these are just plain numbers showing a synthetic performance, which will may differ from the actual gaming performance.
AMD Radeon R9 290X and 290 will be equipped with four display outputs: HDMI, DisplayPort and two DVIs. Since R9 series you will now be able to connect displays to different connectors in order to enable Eyefinity configuration.
The R9 290X and 290 will be released next week. The expected price for 290X is $649/€649, while R9 290 should cost around €520/$499.

Source: WCCFtech

 

[pcslookout]

Nice!

 

[Arkadrel]

The ROPs where a bottleneck with the 79xx cards right? that was one of the believed reasons why a 7950 OCed reached nearly same speeds as the 7970s, and why you didnt get as much outta OCing a 7970.

So all this really means is these will see bigger increases from overclocking?
from better ratio of SP to ROP ratio.

 

[SPBHM]

The ROPs where a bottleneck with the 79xx cards right? that was one of the believed reasons why a 7950 OCed reached nearly same speeds as the 7970s, and why you didnt get as much outta OCing a 7970.

So all this really means is these will see bigger increases from overclocking?
from better ratio of SP to ROP ratio.

well, if you look at this http://anandtech.com/bench/GPU13/549 it doesn't look like a bottleneck, but maybe the test is not good enough, or relevant enough for this

 

[Attic]

Wow, here comes the Boomstick!

Looking forward to reviews.

 

[Arkadrel]

well, if you look at this http://anandtech.com/bench/GPU13/549 it doesn't look like a bottleneck, but maybe the test is not good enough, or relevant enough for this

Thats probably not the best test, but again....

((2048/1792) -1 ) x 100% = ~14,2% more steam proccessors.

Then you factor in that the 7970 runs at ~925-1000mhz, and the 7950 runs only at 800mhz.

The differnce should be alot bigger, in pixelfillrates between the two.....
yet it isnt.

Isnt that the definition of a bottleneck?
Id heard many people point towards the ROPs as whats holding the 7970 back.

Hopefully this wont be a issue with the 290x when it gets overclocked.

 

[RussianSensation]

WOW, I'll be the first to admit how wrong I was about AMD's ability to fit so many ROPs, TMUs, SPs and 512-bit bus into what can now be called a tiny 425mm2 die. I am floored.

R9 290 sounds like the sleeper of the holiday season. Same # of ROPs, same 512-bit bus, same 4GB of VRAM, same VRAM clock speed? If so, this thing is going to fly off the shelves at $499 as I doubt R9 290X oc will beat the R9 290 oc by much.

I love how AMD continues the tradition of having the 2nd card from the top retain the same ROPs/memory bus of the flagship. This has allowed the 5850, 6950 and 7950 OC to come within 5-7% of the overclocked 5870/6970/7970, since AMD's GPUs don't scale linearly with the number of SPs.

The ROPs where a bottleneck with the 79xx cards right? that was one of the believed reasons why a 7950 OCed reached nearly same speeds as the 7970s, and why you didnt get as much outta OCing a 7970

It's one of the major bottlenecks in Tahiti. 7970 only had 9% real world pixel fill-rate than 7950B. Even when overclocked to 1250mhz, the 7970 could barely pull away from an 1190mhz 7950 despite higher # of TMUs and SPs.

R9 290X cards are going to be flying now. In all the games where 7970 was anchored by pixel fill-rate bottlenecks, R9 290X will be mopping the floor with it. With 512-bit bus, the memory bandwidth is also unlikely to be a bottleneck. If that memory hits 6Ghz with overclocking, the GPU will have 384GB/sec or 33% more than 7970GE.

 

[Keysplayr]

I've always wondered why AMD was able to attain so much higher transistor density on an equivalent manufacturing process over Nvidia.

 

[Genx87]

Hopefully this will push the price of Nvidia products down. Im looking at you 770!

 

[Haserath]

Wasn't there also a rumor that they doubled the tesselation capability? This thing should fly.

 

[parvadomus]

It should be faster than 2x7870, it doubles it on everything but shaders

 

[Stuka87]

Tahiti was certainly ROP limited, many tests show it. If these slides are true, this thing is going to be a monster of a card.

 

[seitur]

Well, it will be interesting to see results on 15th.

Most important - will it be paper launch or actual one on 15th?

 

[crazzy.heartz]

I've always wondered why AMD was able to attain so much higher transistor density on an equivalent manufacturing process over Nvidia.

Maybe the same reason why they are able to adopt newer DX, new nodes, new Gddr; faster than Nvidia.... Always... For like past 3-4 years...

 

[MrK6]

Wow, show me a water block and I'll get one.

 

[LegSWAT]

I've always wondered why AMD was able to attain so much higher transistor density on an equivalent manufacturing process over Nvidia.

let's see

GK110-400-A1: 7,08bn transistors on 561 sqmm die area ~ 12,6m trans/sqmm
Tahiti: 4,31bn transistors on 365 sqmm die area ~ 11,8m trans/sqmm
Hawaii: ~6bn transistors (?) on 424 sqmm die area ~ 14,15m trans/sqmm

So yes, if rumors are true, Hawaii is a massive jump in transistor density from Tahiti and a significant jump even from Titan.

 

[Keysplayr]

let's see

GK110-400-A1: 7,08bn transistors on 561 sqmm die area ~ 12,6m trans/sqmm
Tahiti: 4,31bn transistors on 365 sqmm die area ~ 11,8m trans/sqmm
Hawaii: ~6bn transistors (?) on 424 sqmm die area ~ 14,15m trans/sqmm

So yes, if rumors are true, Hawaii is a massive jump in transistor density from Tahiti and a significant jump even from Titan.

Wow, thanks for that. I was not aware that GK110 had higher Xstor density than Tahiti. And yes, that is quite a jump to Hawaii.

 

[smackababy]

Wow, show me a water block and I'll get one.

If the 290x is $650, I doubt I will pick it up. If the 290 is less than $500, give me a few sample picks of new waterblocks and I will surely grab one immediately.

 

[JBT]

Looks really impressive. Can't wait to see benches. I JUST down graded from a 680 to a 7850 though... Just haven't found many games that keep my interest to have such an expensive card anymore.

 

[AnandThenMan]

WOW, I'll be the first to admit how wrong I was about AMD's ability to fit so many ROPs, TMUs, SPs and 512-bit bus into what can now be called a tiny 425mm2 die. I am floored.

Me too. In fact I won't believe it until the NDA lifts and we see the info for realz. It just sounds too good to be true.

 

[AdamK47]

Looks promising.

 

[HurleyBird]

With 64 ROPs, I bet this beast responds really well to memory overclocking. I wonder if aftermarket versions will do a lot better here with higher rated memory? At 1250MHz, I bet AMD is only using 5Gbps ICs.

let's see

GK110-400-A1: 7,08bn transistors on 561 sqmm die area ~ 12,6m trans/sqmm
Tahiti: 4,31bn transistors on 365 sqmm die area ~ 11,8m trans/sqmm
Hawaii: ~6bn transistors (?) on 424 sqmm die area ~ 14,15m trans/sqmm

So yes, if rumors are true, Hawaii is a massive jump in transistor density from Tahiti and a significant jump even from Titan.

To put things in further prespective, Pitcairn clocks in at 13,2m trans/sqmm and GK104 at 12,0 trans/sqmm.

Hawaii transistor density is certainly impressive, and for all we know could be even higher as all AMD has given us is "more than 6 billion transistors"

 

[Gloomy]

This is bananas. If it turns out to be true, R9 290 is going to be a 6950 all over again for me.

 

[blackened23]

ocUK hinted that the 290 is a smidgen slower than the GTX 780 but very much faster than the GTX 770 - and will be much cheaper than the 780. So if AMD has any sense, i'd expect the 290 non X to occupy a price spot of 450$-500$ which would be fantastic IMHO. Overclocking would definitely play a role in the overall value and the hints there are, again, that it OC's and scales very well. In fact, it should easily OC past GTX 780 levels, although to be fair the GTX 780 can overclock very well also (with a big performance jump). Let's just hope that vendors don't freakin' voltage lock their cards......

So if these rumors are true the 290 non X will definitely be the king in AMD's lineup in terms of performance per dollar (along with 280X). Even better, assuming CF-eyefinity is fixed, that could make the 290 a heck of a deal for crossfire. I'm optimistic about frametimes with the 290, because the cat 13.11 drivers improve single card frametimes on the 280X to be better than the GTX 770 per PCPer's benchmarks....hopefully AMD has wisened up about software. IMHO, for AMD, it's all about software quality - that is what they need to work/focus on the most. NV has been better than AMD in this area for some time and i'd like for AMD to match NV in that respect.

I've said it before and i'll say it again: NV can command price premiums based on that software quality, so AMD can't realistically command NV type price premiums...yet. But if AMD significantly improves in this respect (and I hope they do), that could mean good things for the 290/290X.

 

[krumme]

Perhaps this is 28nm hpm process?