The AMD Radeon R9 290X Review
by Ryan Smith on October 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
A Bit More On Graphics Core Next 1.1
With the launch of Hawaii, AMD is finally opening up a bit more on what Graphics Core Next 1.1 entails. No, they still aren’t giving us an official name – most references to GCN 1.1 are noting that 290X (Hawaii) and 260X (Bonaire) are part of the same IP pool – but now that AMD is in a position where they have their new flagship out they’re at least willing to discuss the official feature set.
So what does it mean to be Graphics Core Next 1.1? As it turns out, the leaked “AMD Sea Islands Instruction Set Architecture” from February appears to be spot on. Naming issues with Sea Islands aside, everything AMD has discussed as being new architecture features in Hawaii (and therefore also in Bonaire) previously showed up in that document.
As such the bulk of the changes that come with GCN 1.1 are compute oriented, and clearly are intended to play into AMD’s plans for HSA by adding features that are especially useful for the style of heterogeneous computing AMD is shooting for.
The biggest change here is support for flat (generic) addressing support, which will be critical to enabling effective use of pointers within a heterogeneous compute context. Coupled with that is a subtle change to how the ACEs (compute queues) work, allowing GPUs to have more ACEs and more queues in each ACE, versus the hard limit of 2 we’ve seen in Southern Islands. The number of ACEs is not fixed – Hawaii has 8 while Bonaire only has 2 – but it means it can be scaled up for higher-end GPUs, console APUs, etc. Finally GCN 1.1 also introduces some new instructions, including a Masked Quad Sum of Absolute Differences (MQSAD) and some FP64 floor/ceiling/truncation vector functions.
Along with these architectural changes, there are a couple of other hardware features that at this time we feel are best lumped under the GCN 1.1 banner when talking about PC GPUs, as GCN 1.1 parts were the first parts to introduce this features and every GCN 1.1 part (at least thus) far has that feature. AMD’s TrueAudio would be a prime example of this, as both Hawaii and Bonaire have integrated TrueAudio hardware, with AMD setting clear expectations that we should also see TrueAudio on future GPUs and future APUs.
AMD’s Crossfire XDMA engine is another feature that is best lumped under the GCN 1.1 banner. We’ll get to the full details of its operation in a bit, but the important part is that it’s a hardware level change (specifically an addition to their display controller functionality) that’s once again present in Hawaii and Bonaire, although only Hawaii is making full use of it at this time.
Finally we’d also roll AMD’s power management changes into the general GCN 1.1 family, again for the basic reasons listed above. AMD’s new Serial VID interface (SIV2), necessary for the large number of power states Hawaii and Bonaire support and the fast switching between them, is something that only shows up starting with GCN 1.1. AMD has implemented power management a bit differently in each product from an end user perspective – Bonaire parts have the states but lack the fine grained throttling controls that Hawaii introduces – but the underlying hardware is identical.
With that in mind, that’s a short but essential summary of what’s new with GCN 1.1. As we noted way back when Bonaire launched as the 7790, the underlying architecture isn’t going through any massive changes, and as such the differences are of primarily of interest to programmers more than end users. But they are distinct differences that will play an important role as AMD gears up to launch HSA next year. Consequently what limited fracturing there is between GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 is primarily due to the ancillary features, which unlike the core architectural changes are going to be of importance to end users. The addition of XDMA, TrueAudio, and improved power management (SIV2) are all small features on their own, but they are features that make GCN 1.1 a more capable, more reliable, and more feature-filled design than GCN 1.0.
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Da W - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The reference cooler is noisy as hell, but it's a blower. At least it doesn't dump all the heat inside your case and let your other case fans handle it. It depends what you're looking for.Still make as much noise as the 5870 did, and it was a commercial success.
slickr - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Didn't think AMD will deliver, in fact I thought from seeing some initial benchmarks that AMD took over 6 months just to deliver a graphic card slower than Titan and that even with a cheap price it wouldn't be enough, boy was I wrong.This card beats Titan in so many games and in so many resolutions and is almost $500 cheaper, its also $100 cheaper than the GTX 780 and anywhere from 5% to 20% faster than the 780, that is just amazing.
Hopefully this trickles down to the medium range cards and we are going to see cards like the 280x go for less than $250.
I mean unless Nvidia positiones the Titan at $550 as well, then I don't think it will sell very much at all. In the 290x you have a better performing card at almost half the price, Nvidia has its work cut out for them and I sure hope the 780 TI edition really brings in the performance and price as well.
eanazag - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I'm sporting a Nvidia GPU in my rig. I don't see any option for Nvidia than to reduce both the Titan, 770, and 780 in cost. I can't expect the 780 Ti performance to trump the Titan. I will say that there is power and cooling room for Nvidia to ratchet things up and make this interesting. This is bold move on AMDs part and does wonders for consumers. Based on some of the other comments current news does not kill off either brand by the way. PC gaming and desktops are not dead.....kwrzesien - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Ryan, can we get a pipeline article or retweet this article when it is complete? Thanks!spiked_mistborn - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Nice job AMD! Competition is good! Also, feel free to use my GSYNC idea about putting a frame buffer in the display and letting the video card control the refresh rate. This post is from March 2013. Apparently adding a dash to make it G-Sync makes it different somehow. http://techreport.com/discussion/24553/inside-the-...Sorodsam - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I'm surprised no one's commented on the new "AMD Center", or this troubling text:"You've landed on the AMD Portal on AnandTech. This section is sponsored by AMD."
There's a big difference between a site that runs an occasional AMD ad and a site with an entire section that's expressively "sponsored by AMD", especially considering AnandTech's (former?) guiding principle that product reviewers shouldn't be aware of who exactly is buying advertising and when. They can hardly be unaware of it now.
MrMaestro - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
The reason people aren't commenting on it is because it's already been commented on. Take a look at the article announcing AMD Centre. That is the appropriate place for such comments.anevmann - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Ryan, will this card require PCIe 3.0 for gaming?Can you do a test with and without PCIe 3.0? I really want this card, but I wanna know in advance if I have to upgrade my system.
A
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
I can't promise when it will be done (given the insanity of our schedule over the next 3 weeks), but at some point we will follow this up with a reprise article, that among other things will cover PCIe bandwidth vs. Crossfire scaling, CF testing in quiet mode, and some noise equalization to see what fan levels it would take to match a GTX 780 and what the resulting performance would look like.Anyhow, for a single card setup none of my data thus far supports PCIe 3.0 being a requirement. We're not to the point yet where PCIe 2.0 x16 is a general gaming bottleneck.
Hung_Low - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Is 290X really the absolute maxed out version Tahiti? Or did it also leave a lot of room like Titan is for GK110.Perhaps the GPUs used in 290x are those Tahiti's with imperfection, with the high quality Tahiti's saved for extreme edition 290x/290x+ ?