Hi guys !
I am trying to decide on what card I should but in my old rig. I'm having trouble finding some direct comparisons between these two cards. When I look at the GTX 780, I see that it has 384 bit memory bus whereas the r9 290 has 512 and it has less Tflops and whatnot, so it should be a bit less powerfull. I am not sure about that though.
I just want the best price/performance card out there :)
Hopefully you guys can help me out (preferably with some proof :D) !
What country are you in and are you affected by bitcoin mining price hikes on cards? Here's a comparison Linus did with watercooling. Not exactly what you're asking for but I hope it helps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaHh-y51us
I found a comparison of the Asus versions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fjwX7v3keo
Whatever is cheapest. They tend to beat one another in different games. One might overclock further than the other. You won't be disappointed either way.
Maybe you should also take Mantle into consideration? It doesn't make a lot of difference with the top tier cards, but even a little is better than nothing. And Crytek just announced a partnership with AMD to bring Mantle to their game engine.
How about TrueAudio? I heard Logan say it sounds out of this world when done right. Anandtech weren't impressed with the implementation in Thief, but they said it has potential based on a tech demo of the technology (you can listen to it yourself on the anandtech page).
Maybe you want to switch to linux sometime in the future (GOG.com is expanding their supported platforms to linux for select games, for example), and on linux NVIDIA is a nightmare, AMD is the way to go for linux.
Thanks for the replies !
I'm from Belgium and I don't think the bitcoin mining has a big influence here (http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/362247/sapphire-r9-290-4gb-gddr5-oc-tri-x.html) the link is to a site ( it's in dutch sorry ) but at the bottom there's a graph with the price over time and it seems rather constant. Unless the bitcoin stuff price was immediatly implemented, I don't think it has an influence here. Europe is pretty expensive for pc parts ( just do a google for the price you see in the graph times USD =/ EDIT : apparantly the prices don't differ that much ^^ ) but yeah.
The R9 290 tends to be the cheaper option in all the online stores I dare to order from ( some from Belgium, some from the Netherlands and then amazon.fr/de and the like ).
Originally I was going for the R9 290, but then a friend mentioned physX and I do admit I like that so I looked deeper into the 780 and now I am at a loss !
Ask your friend how many games use PhysX.
I know of none, and I would like to know which are.
R9 290 is the better option in Europe. It is cheaper than the 780 and offers a bit more performance, along with Mantle and (much more importantly) TrueAudio.
PhysX is pretty much dead. There was a time when a few games used it. The only recent title that comes into my mind is the Batman series, and I would personally not buy a 780 just for this game.
Edit: If you are comfortable with ordering the R9 in a german store, have a look at this: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/4096MB-Sapphire-Radeon-R9-290-Tri-X-OC-Aktiv-PCIe-3-0-x16--Full-Retail-_946304.html It is currently not on stock so you might have to wait a bit until the card arrives but it's approx 20 bucks cheaper than what I saw in your link. If you are ordering there, make sure to oder after midnight because you are not going to have to pay for shipment (at least thats the case if the destination is germany...).
I am actually looking to buy this card myself. I will just wait until they have the card in stock
If u just look at base performance i would say 780 gtx. And in my opinion Nvidia have better drivers and updates:-)
u can also use this page:-)
http://www.hwcompare.com
Apparently there's a pretty decent number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support
Driver quality is pretty similar now, AMD's crappy drivers are a thing of the past. And if you want to talk about Linux drivers, nVidia's are trash while AMD's are somewhat decent.
In terms of performance, a lot depends on the games in question. If there's a significant price difference, I'd just go with the cheaper one.
That is exactly what I did !
And after that I just checked the same list that Morgoth posted.
I know it's a bit iffy. I am leaning more towards the R9 290.
In benchmarks the 780 does seem to come out above the r9 290 most of the times. Which baffles me because of the lower Tflops and whatnot.
Which benches were you looking at? The ones they had on anandtech were largely favored the r9 290, but game selection makes a big difference.