Radeon R9-290X: Hardware specs and benchmarks of AMD’s Titan killer

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Updated @ 17:05 ET: At the Hawaii launch event (in Hawaii, of course!) AMD has… not announced GCN 2.0. Instead, it seems that the Hawaii cores are reworks of the Southern Islands (Radeon HD 7000-series) chips, with the Hawaii XT (in the R9-290X) boasting 37.5% more cores than the Tahiti XT (Radeon HD 7970). Except for the mentions of GCN 2.0 below, the rest of the data should be accurate.

Ahead of AMD’s official unveil of the Hawaii line of GPUs, details, photos, and benchmarks of (probably) the Radeon R9-290X have leaked. The photos and benchmarks seem to confirm that the Hawaii XT (GCN 2.0) R9-290X has 2816 stream processors, split among 44 clusters. There’ll probably be 64 ROPs (render output units), and around 176 TMUs (texture mapping units). The GPU should be clocked at around 900MHz, and there’ll be a fat 512-bit memory bus to GDDR5 RAM. The new R9 GPUs are DirectX 11.2 compliant, while the R7 GPUs don’t seem to be. The leaked benchmarks peg the Radeon R9-290X as equal or slightly faster than Nvidia’s GTX Titan, and around 10% faster than the GTX 780 — strong, and if it’s priced right, it could put AMD back in the driving seat.
AMD is expected to reveal its long-awaited Graphics Core Next (GCN) 2.0 architecture later this week, with chips based on GCN 2.0 — Hawaii, Hawaii Pro, and Hawaii XT — following some time in October. We’ll have more discussion of GCN 2.0, and how it helps AMD compete against Nvidia in the gaming and supercomputing scenes, once the official specs and block diagrams have been revealed. For now, we’ll take a quick look at the rumored hardware specs, and some photos and benchmarks from a Korean hardware site (DG’s Nerdy Story) that appears to have got its hands on a Radeon R9-290X graphics card ahead of schedule.

As you can see in the photos, there are 16 memory chips, which would indicate that the R9-290X has a 512-bit memory bus to 4GB of GDDR5 RAM (rather than 384-bit, which is usually associated with 12 chips). The die size of the chip (which is presumed to be the Hawaii XT) is estimated to be around 424 millimeters square — larger than the Radeon 7970′s GPU (Tahiti XT), but smaller than GTX Titan’s GK110. This is quite impressive, given that the R9-290X posts up to 10% better performance than Titan. From previous leaks, we believe that the Hawaii XT has up to 2816 stream processors, split among 44 clusters, with up to 64 ROPs and 176 TMUs. It will almost certainly be built by TSMC on its 28nm process. The chip will be clocked at around 900MHz, but there’s no word no the memory bus speed.
In the benchmarks below the graphic card’s name has been blanked out, but it’s probably the R9-290X, but it could also be the Hawaii Pro-based R9-290 (which will probably be quite similar to the X, just clocked slower).





So far, it looks like AMD’s Hawaii GPUs are shaping up nicely. With performance that can only just unseat GTX Titan, though, it will entirely come down to pricing. Industry sources are pointing towards a $600 price point for the R9-290X, which would put it well below the GTX Titan’s $1,000 price tag, and cheaper even than the $650 GTX 780. Nvidia, of course, can (and will) strike back by lowering its own prices — and then, in a few months, it might have its own architectural overhauls in the shape of Kepler’s successor, Maxwell, due in 2014.
Again, we’ll have more information about the R9-290X and the rest of the Volcanic Island GPUs when AMD officially unveils them — probably in the next few days. If you’re looking for more info on the new numbering scheme (R9, rather than 9000-series), we have a story that discusses it — but it’s mostly conjecture as AMD hasn’t yet spoken officially about it