AMD announcing new videocards

http://www.livestream.com/amdlivestream?t=637320

Started a few minutes ago.

Oh man, they didn't give a price for their top tier card.

Edit - Found info elsewhere. $600.00.

pretty sure it will come later but the rest of them are really cheap.

@darji: Found this.

http://videocardz.com/46006/amd-radeon-r9-290x-specifications-confirmed-costs-600

They are changing their model numbers to be more like Nvidia, yet they will be less powerful when you straight up compare the numbers it seems.

R7 X260 $139

R9 X270 $199

R9 X280 $299

R9 X290 $???, they are taking preorders for this starting Oct 3rd, and it comes with Battlefield 4, preorders only.

They are implying that the 290X is ready for 4k displays.

Lots of audio talk...

Holy crap, the R9 X290 is a monster. AMD is not backing down from the challenge Nvidia threw out with the Titan. I'm holding on to my 7970 Ghz a while longer though, but I cannot wait for the reviews.

Is the X for Xtreme? Video card names are the worst thing about the gaming industry.

Anyway, nice to see their top tier card undercutting NVIDIA by $50. Video card competition is the best thing about the gaming industry.

What's the difference between the R9 290X and the R9 290?

This is insane; announce new videocards; talk about the audio capabilities of your new videocards for an hour...

Great! I've been holding off on building a new PC until the new AMD cards came.

So is this in place of the new HD 9000 series? Or is the 9000 still slated for later this year?

True, but I have seen the 780 on sale for less than 600 bucks now since places have sales and such.

@vuud: this is it, prices seem really good, but we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see how they fall compared to Nvidia, they seem too low priced, you are either looking at a $300 card or a $600 card, that's kind of a big gap right in the range that a lot of PC gamers buy.

So my graphics card is also a sound card now?

I've been fascinated by 3D/binaural recordings for a long time, if they can really manage that level of sound quality in games, I'm so on board. 3D audio plus an oculus rift, and you're basically in the Matrix.

These Lichdom guys are weird; Lichdom=Skyrim+Magika? That could be cool.

Bald guy is insane.

The best part about listening to audio professionals talk about advanced audio technology is laughing my ass off everytime i hear the hot mic clipping.

"AMD: audio so advanced they haven't yet build a compressor that can contain it!"

Also, true. Although that card's been out for about 5 months now (or about half a cycle in GPU years).

Not trying to say that either company is better, at all. Just that I had sort of feared that with the release of the Titan for a looooot of money, that the top tier (reasonable) cards from both companies would get more expensive. But that's not the case, and everybody wins!

AMD is developing it's own cross platform graphics API called Mantle (Dice is testing it for them) which will allow developers to easily make games for all consoles and PC.

Replacement for Direct X? crazy thing to save for the end.

This should be interesting, i remember a few years back reading something about Dice's developers saying they thought DirectX was holding them back but all i could find was this article that linked the quote to AMD in early 2011.

I'm curious what AMD does with their API but i feel if they create a super restrictive system like Microsoft does with DirectX then it won't go anywhere. Still, big news in the many news events that are coming out that sound like they want to kick DirectX out of the picture.

mantle looks pretty cool, i really hope that thing is compatible with atleast the older GCN cards.
The audio stuff was kind of crappy for people listning in through the stream, if you want to experience it proper, put your headphones on, kill all othe noise and listen to this
And while it was pretty interesting, i'm not sure this little event was the perfect forum for it, but then again, im not sure anyone else would have given those guys a chance.

Everyone that gets confused by graphics card naming schedules should just stop trying to figure them out, just forget it, and look at how the card actually performs instead, don't give two shits about what it's called.

If you cant figure out the "X", don't think about it.IF you want to compare graphics cards by name, the only safe thing to do is compare cards within the same generation, and cause that's what the manufacturers intend you to do, do not try to figure out performance across multiple generations or manufacturers.

290 is the equevalent of the 7950, while 290x is the 7970.The actual specs are not quite official yet, but all you need to know is that 290x is the faster one.

@sin4profit:

i quote techspot.com

We've been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs. It should also make cross-development between PC and console games a lot easier, and also more incredible for those with a high-performance AMD GPU.

More information on Mantle will be available at the AMD Developer Summit in November.

Anyone find any concrete info on how the 290X stacks against the 780? Synthetic benchmarks and gaming benchmarks seem all over the place for this comparison.

I love that as well.
Also the same reason why I love someone like Twitch and their tech-guys showing up in places and firing up a stream to talk about the future and "how they mastered streaming content worldwide to millions of people 24/7" and then the stream just shuts down or lags for everyone watching.

If this is the same api the consoles use then theoretically i wont need to upgrade my 7950 for a while? eh, well i hope thats the case

@masterpaperlink: if mantle supports your card, perhaps, but it could just mean that we get 2018's eyecandy today, and that you'll have to replace graphics cards just as usual to keep up.

There is a long tradition of stupid pictures on video card boxes.

As for AMD, the problem was never really their price-performance but their driver support was never great. Compared to Intel and Nvidia, AMD's software quality was often comical.

@kidavenger: yeah so does that mean a developer would have to write a Mantle-enabled graphics sub-system for their game to take advantage of the speed increases? But maintain an OpenGL or DirectX sub-system for Intel and NVidia cards? Because if that's true it's DOA in PC gaming land.

Yep. Fanboyism is certainly part of the split on these cards (everyone needs a villain I guess...), but the driver issues are pretty undeniable just looking at any PC gaming forum.

Hopefully they can at least keep the pressure on NVIDIA for the next round of cards.

There was a slide before the one I posted that said Mantle is compatible with Direct X.

They said nothing about Open GL

They didn't specifically say but they made it sound like Mantle would be compatible with Nvidia cards.

They didn't say anything about Intel.

I think a lot more info about Mantle will come out in November when they have their developer conference.

The reason why Mantle is important is they are doing the same thing Nvidia has with CUDA. You can write OpenGL and DirectX or specialized device drivers with CUDA. CUDA is standard across any "modern" Nvidia graphics hardware. The goal with CUDA is that instruction should react the same regardless of hardware and specific graphics device. I'm getting that this is the same goal ATI wants with Mantle.

Hopefully this effort will improve stability for AMD-ATI graphics drivers which has helped make Nvidia very solid. Instead of Windows, Mac, or Linux having to cobble together specialized code for each family of ATI graphics hardware that has to change every time the kernel or graphics system updates, they can now all write a single set of low-level and mid-level drivers with a consistent interface.

Driver is a great game. But what about the effect Steam Cards are going to have on the market?

Steam: Your one-stop-shop for all things PC related.

I'm fairly excited about the new AMD GPUs, especially since I'll need to buy a new GPU pretty soon since my last purchase was kinda shitty...

@extomar said:

This is very true. I use an AMD card and most of the problems i run into with gaming on the PC has been AMD card related. Still i'm curious to see what becomes of Mantle.

@sin4profit: harddrives, motherboards and processors dont really have to get driverupdates for every new game you play, the graphics card is obviously going to be the component that has the most potential for trouble, regardless of brand.

@devildoll: Yes, but by way of odds if there's a problem with a game it tendsto trace back to AMD more often than not. Whether it's their drivers or their relationship communicating with developers i don't know, but it is a common problem with them.

the only real game issue i've had with them in semi-recent memory was when BC2 had long loadtimes, which got resolved after a couple of months.

What problems have you had?

@fattony12000 said:

Man, I'd be so ashamed to have this in my store...