AMD Hawaii R9 290X GPU specifications leak early

[Shawn Knight]

Specifications on AMD’s upcoming Hawaii R9 290X GPU have hit the web a week before the silicon is scheduled to be unveiled. The 28nm chip, based on AMD’s second generation Graphics CoreNext microarchitecture, is expected to go head to head with Nvidia’s GK110 silicon.

According to German website 3DCenter.org, the chip will carry an estimated die-area of 430 mm² which is 18 percent bigger than Tahiti. It’ll feature 2,816 stream processors across 44 clusters with 64 stream processors each – a 37.5 percent increase over Tahiti. Base clock should check in somewhere just north of 900MHz.

We’re also hearing the chip will ship with four independent raster engines (only two on Tahiti) which could translate into twice the geometry processing performance. The memory interface is said to be 384-bit wide as per the GDDR5 specification. Support for DirectX 11.2 will come baked in alongside the hyped shared resources feature.

AMD is widely expected to unveil the new GPU at a special technical showcase in Hawaii next week. The company is flying a number of tech journalists out for the occasion with a hard launch expected a few weeks later – pinning the launch sometime in early October.

Reports from last month suggested Asus, MSI and PowerColor would be among the first to ship Hawaii-based products. AMD has already cut prices for select Radeon HD 7000 series cards including the HD 7990.

Either way, we should know something for sure by this time next week.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/54065-amd-hawaii-r9-290x-gpu-specifications-leak-early.html

 

[Ranger1st]

Waiting to upgrade my 6970.. although I've yet to play a game that's taxed it when OC'ed ( lost planet 3 on very high seems to push it )..

 

[Burty117]

Sounds promising, Would be nice to see ATI take the top spot again! Mainly because then 780 prices would have to come down and I can then afford to SLI mine xD

 

[Jad Chaar]

Wow 38%. AMD really wants to stomp on nVidia. Let us hope their drivers dont hold them back xD!

 

[amstech]

Specs look nice, but they always seem amazing at first.
Only actual gaming results matter (to me anyways).

Waiting to upgrade my 6970.. although I've yet to play a game that's taxed it when OC'ed ( lost planet 3 on very high seems to push it )..

Do you play at 1366 X 768? Thats the only way a 6970 will crush everything. I remember plenty of demanding games with the eye candy turned up that made short work of my 6970 at 1080p.
Not trying to knock your GPU or anything just saying.

 

[Alpha Gamer]

Waiting to upgrade my 6970.. although I've yet to play a game that's taxed it when OC'ed ( lost planet 3 on very high seems to push it )..

Where do you live? 720p City?

Edit: Sorry for the bad joke. Send me a private message if you want a Crysis 2 steam cd-key or Battlefield 3

 

[Guest]

You're joking, right?

 

[Xtreme gamer]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

 

[Guest]

It should be faster than Titan by around 10%

 

[PC nerd]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?

 

[oldikes]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?

trying to understand technology.

 

[Guest]

"What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?"

--> not every member here understand technology as well as yours

 

[gamoniac]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?

If you know enough, you know you don't know enough.

 

[Guest]

Everyone talks about 38% more cores but noone speaks about 17% less speed than 7970GE. With these numbers it should be between GTX780 and Titan performance wise. But... We need to know about boost. If the boost is high enough it will be able to be at the same league as Titan for sure. As AMD states: "We will see at 25th of September"...

 

[dividebyzero]

Everyone talks about 38% more cores but noone speaks about 17% less speed than 7970GE. With these numbers it should be between GTX780 and Titan performance wise. But... We need to know about boost. If the boost is high enough it will be able to be at the same league as Titan for sure. As AMD states: "We will see at 25th of September"...

Boost frequencies (and it should be dynamic- more along the lines of what Nvidia utilize) will depend upon power draw. Assuming that the design is similar to Tahiti/Pitcairn then I wouldn't expect a high boost state since the board will likely also feature a maximum input power threshold. Tahiti is a 200 watt GPU in usual trim, adding 37.5%* more shaders will more than offset even the conservative clocks reminiscent of the initial HD 7970. The design probably won't see its real potential until high clocked vendor designs arrive (I.e an MSI R9-290X Lightning or Sapphire Toxic) just as the 780's performance increases markedly with relaxed voltage control.

* The 2816 shader number really only works if the uncore ( memory control & interface, I/O, thread dispatch) remains essentially unchanged from Tahiti (I.e basically tacking extra shaders into the design). The uncore makes up just over half of the die area in Tahiti. Multiplying the remaining die space, 170mm², by the percentage increase in core count (37.5%) makes the design "do-able" within the quoted 430 mm² - Tahiti's raw die size being 352mm² (365mm² with die packaging).

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?

trying to understand technology.

You're not alone brother.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

I don't understand all the tech jargon.
Can anyone that does please explain if it up there with Titan performance for instance?

What are you doing on this site if you don't understand technology?

If you know enough, you know you don't know enough.

Fair enough. I don't know enough, but for me, I know enough. For a lot of people, enough is never enough. Enough said.

 

[godrilla]

4 more days till gk 110 discounts!

 

[dividebyzero]

4 more days till gk 110 discounts!

Closer to a month. Nvidia won't cut prices until the competition hits the (r)etail shelves.

BTW: Here are pics, some purported benchmarks (card is apparently OC'ed to maximum stable clocks of 1020MHz core, 5 GHz effective memory) and specs (supposedly 512-bit hence the lower memory frequency). The card is obviously an engineering sample so you would expect the production card to clock higher than this.
Overclocked performance works out to be +1.7% (1920 res) and +4% (2560 res) over the stock Titan, and +7.8% (1920) and +11.6% (2560) over the stock GTX 780 using the highest image quality settings of each benchmark.

If the 950-975 base frequency is on the money then that puts stock vs. stock at around (maybe a percentage point or two higher) GTX 780 levels.

Get ready....
Get set....
ARGUE!

 

[godrilla]

Closer to a month. Nvidia won't cut prices until the competition hits the (r)etail shelves.

BTW: Here are pics, some purported benchmarks (card is apparently OC'ed to maximum stable clocks of 1020MHz core, 5 GHz effective memory) and specs (supposedly 512-bit hence the lower memory frequency). The card is obviously an engineering sample so you would expect the production card to clock higher than this.
Overclocked performance works out to be +1.7% (1920 res) and +4% (2560 res) over the stock Titan, and +7.8% (1920) and +11.6% (2560) over the stock GTX 780 using the highest image quality settings of each benchmark.

If the 950-975 base frequency is on the money then that puts stock vs. stock at around (maybe a percentage point or two higher) GTX 780 levels.

Get ready....
Get set....
ARGUE!

Impressive thanks I really hope these are true