AMD releases new driver for smoother performance in Radeon R9 290X Quiet Mode

The launch of the flagship Radeon R9 290X was not entirely uncontroversial. The hardware site Tom’s Hardware reported varying performance between test copies in the media and graphics cards in the trade. This raised suspicions that AMD had sent out so-called golden samples to get favorable reviews.

In SweClocker’s test lab, however, it was discovered that this does not necessarily have to be the case. The Radeon R9 290X has two performance modes, there About fashion gives maximum performance while Quiet Mode lowers the fan speed for a lower noise level.

The latter, however, also regulates the clock frequencies according to the temperature of the graphics card. Small variations in, for example, the room temperature or the fan speed can thus give the impression that some specimens perform better than others.

We’ve identified that there’s variability in fan speeds across AMD R9 290 series boards. This variability in fan speed translates into variability of the cooling capacity of the fan-sink. The flexibility of AMD PowerTune technology enables us to correct this variability in a driver update. This update will normalize the fan RPMs to the correct values.

Now AMD is releasing a new driver that will even out the differences between different models through improved control of the fan speeds. For Radeon R9 290X i Quiet Mode is the benchmark 2,200 rpm while the fan in the Radeon R9 290 will spin at 2,650 rpm. The GPU-Z tool can be used to read the current speeds.

The new driver is called Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2 and will, in addition to the improved control over the fan speeds in Quiet Mode also provide better performance with anti-aliasing enabled in the newly launched Call of Duty: Ghosts. The software is available for download from AMD’s website.