Radeon R9 290: specs and benchmarks

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Aggregate performance score

Radeon R9 290 provides acceptable gaming and benchmark performance at 18.30% of a leader's which is RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell.

Summary

AMD started Radeon R9 290 sales 5 November 2013 at a recommended price of $399. This is a desktop graphics card based on a GCN 2.0 architecture and made with 28 nm manufacturing process. It is primarily aimed at gamer market. 4 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.25 GHz are supplied, and together with 512 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 320.0 GB/s.

Compatibility-wise, this is a dual-slot graphics card attached via PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 275 mm. One 6-pin and one 8-pin connectors are required, and power consumption is at 275 Watt.

Primary details

Some basic facts about Radeon R9 290: architecture, market segment, release date etc.

Place in the ranking311
Place by popularitynot in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation6.68
Power efficiency5.36of 100.00 (Radeon 890M)
ArchitectureGCN 2.0 (2013−2017)
GPU code nameHawaii
Market segmentDesktop
Release date5 November 2013 (11 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)$399 of 14,999 (Quadro Plex 7000)

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

The higher the ratio, the better. We use the manufacturer's recommended prices.

Performance to price scatter graph

Detailed specifications

Radeon R9 290's specs such as number of shaders, GPU base clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of Radeon R9 290's performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.

Pipelines / CUDA cores2560of 960 (GeForce GTX 660)
Core clock speed947 MHzof 980 (GeForce GT 755M SLI)
Number of transistors6,200 millionof 100,000 million (Data Center GPU Max 1100)
Manufacturing process technology28 nmof 0.003 MB (Arc Graphics 140V)
Power consumption (TDP)275 Wattof 235 (FirePro S9150)
Texture fill rate151.5of 1,968 (RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell)
Floating-point processing power4.849 TFLOPSof 126 (RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell)
ROPs64of 512 (Moore Threads MTT S4000)
TMUs160of 896 (Data Center GPU Max 1350)
L1 Cache640 KBof 64 MB (Data Center GPU Max 1550)
L2 Cache1024 KBof 408 MB (Data Center GPU Max 1350)

Form factor & compatibility

This section provides details about the physical dimensions of Radeon R9 290 and its compatibility with other computer components. This information is useful when selecting a computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards, it includes details about the interface and bus (for motherboard compatibility) and additional power connectors (for power supply compatibility).

InterfacePCIe 3.0 x16
Length275 mm
Width2-slot
Supplementary power connectors1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of memory installed on Radeon R9 290: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors have no dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM instead.

Memory typeGDDR5
Maximum RAM amount4 GBof 288 GB (Radeon Instinct MI325X)
Memory bus width512 Bitof 384 (GeForce GTX 980 Ti)
Memory clock speed1250 MHzof 16384000 MB (GeForce RTX 4050 Mobile)
Memory bandwidth320.0 GB/sof 983040 MB (GeForce RTX 5080)

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on Radeon R9 290. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference graphics cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model, while non-reference desktop models can (though not necessarily will) bear a different set of video ports.

Display Connectors2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort
HDMI+

API and SDK support

APIs supported by Radeon R9 290, sometimes including their particular versions.

DirectX12 (12_0)
Shader Model6.3
OpenGL4.6
OpenCL2.0
Vulkan1.2.131

Benchmark performance

Synthetic benchmark performance of Radeon R9 290. The combined score is measured on a 0-100 point scale.


Combined synthetic benchmark score

This is our combined benchmark score.

R9 290
18.30

Passmark

This is the most ubiquitous GPU benchmark. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various types of load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the last being done in 4K resolution if possible), and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities.

R9 290 8093
Samples: 713

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

Fire Strike is a DirectX 11 benchmark for gaming PCs. It features two separate tests displaying a fight between a humanoid and a fiery creature made of lava. Using 1920x1080 resolution, Fire Strike shows off some realistic graphics and is quite taxing on hardware.

R9 290 11860

Unigine Heaven 4.0

This is an old DirectX 11 benchmark, a newer version of Unigine 3.0 with relatively small differences. It displays a fantasy medieval town sprawling over several flying islands. The benchmark is still sometimes used, despite its significant age, as it was released back in 2013.

R9 290 1440

Gaming performance

Let's see how good Radeon R9 290 is for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in frames per second. Comparisons with game system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect reality inaccurately.

Closest competitors

Radeon R9 290's performance relative to its closest rivals among desktop graphics cards.


Radeon RX 470 100.05
Radeon R9 290 100

NVIDIA equivalent

According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to Radeon R9 290 is GeForce GTX TITAN, which is faster by 1% and higher by 3 positions in our ranking.

Here are some closest NVIDIA rivals to Radeon R9 290:

Similar GPUs

Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.

Recommended processors

These processors are most commonly used with Radeon R9 290 according to our statistics.

All comparisons with Radeon R9 290

Community ratings

Here you can see the user rating of the graphics card, as well as rate it yourself.


4.1 607 votes

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Comments

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