Radeon R9 290X and 290 – full specifications leak online

After the launch of the first models in the Radeon 200 series, the focus is on the flagships Radeon 290X and 290. These are based on the lavish graphics processor Hawaii, which is in fact the only real novelty in the new generation of graphics cards.

After several leaks, where, among other things, AMD themselves happened to post the specifications on their own website, most of the details are already known. Now the press material can also be found online, which means that hardly any secrets remain.

The flagship Radeon R9 290X contains the Hawaii XT graphics processor with 2,816 stream processors and 64 raster units (ROPs). This is comparable to the Radeon HD 7970 and Tahiti XT with 2,048 stream processors and 32 ROPs. For this, over six billion transistors are used for a theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS.

This includes 5.0 GB of 5.0 GHz GDDR5 memory with a 512-bit memory bus, giving a total bandwidth of 320 gigabytes per second. The clock frequencies amount to 1.0 GHz for the graphics processor.

AMD claims that the new graphics card is particularly suitable for games in 4K resolution and points out, among other things, that the Radeon R9 290X should be able to keep about 60 fps in Battlefield 3. In addition, there is talk of good scaling in Crossfire: 87 percent better performance with two graphics cards and 160 percent with three.

Although the flagship Radeon R9 290X gets the most attention, the scaled-down cousin R9 290 can also be seen in the data sheets. This uses the Hawaii Pro graphics processor with 2,560 stream processors and slightly lower clock speeds, but the lavish 4 GB GDDR5 memory configuration on the 512-bit memory bus remains.

It is not yet known when the Radeon R9 290X and 290 will be on the market, but considering the pre-booking package with Battlefield 4, the sales start should start before the end of the month. The game will be launched on October 29 in North America and on October 31 in Sweden.

Source: WCCFTech.