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Forged with its latest GCN 1.1 architecture at centre, the AMD R9 290X sports a cutting edge Hawaii XT chipset that sets out to better Nvidia's cards - right up to the mighty GTX Titan - for a considerable discount. And unlike the 260X and 270X cards released earlier this year, which were simple rebrands of the existing HD 7790 and 7870 GPUs respectively, this is the company's most forward-thinking entry in the series yet. In amongst support for the pending Mantle API, a unique on-chip TrueAudio sound processing technology makes the cut, plus an ambitious push for gaming at full 4K resolution. At over £400 this is a wee bit on the dear side for many, but fortunately we now have a cut-down edition of the card in our hands as well: the R9 290, With a mind to achieve a more agreeable circa £300 price-tag, concessions are made to its specs in all the right places - all while still producing competitive results compared to Nvidia's very best.
As part of this eager push for 4K gaming, both the R9 290 and 290X offer up the widest memory buses of any AMD card ever released, counting in at a remarkable 512-bit. This opens the floodgates to some blazing fast access speeds to its 4GB pool of 5GHz RAM, the result being an overall fill-rate of 320GB/s for each card. It's a number that sounds excessive on paper, but any games operating at 2560x1440 and beyond with a lick of MSAA will soon see this statistic put to practical use. For the cheaper 290 variant, cutbacks are made in alternative areas: it takes the 1000MHz maximum core clock of the 290X down to 947MHz, active compute units from 176 to 160, while stream processors get chopped from 2816 to a still respectable count of 2560.
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