I have to admit, i'm very tempted to buy two of those nice looking new R9 290Xs...
Predictions on Nvidia's response to Mantle and if they will just completely destroy AMD's R9 series w/ the 800 series, or maybe 800 series will lack behind the R9's?
Opinions and advice please, wait for Nvidia's response or jump on the first R9 290X's to be released?
When do you want to upgrade/build a system?
If it's now, wait and get a 290x (if benchmarks are nice for the money).
If you want to build/upgrade a system in Q2 2014, wait for nVidia...
tl;dr Let when you upgrade or build a system determine what you buy, not the other way around.
Nvidia will respond to the new cards with something just that little bit faster, thats usaly what happens. Mantle is open, so i hope Nvidia uses it and we can give the finger to Direct-x and MS. But i see Nvidia not playing nice and not using it. When it comes to new video cards i always wait to see both sides as you can get the fastest card and the outer will get a price drop.
IIRC Mantle uses compute power on the GPU for shading and whatnot. That would mean that games using Mantle (so alot of upcoming EA titles) would be better on AMD GPUs since they have better computer power then nvidia cards.
That is if I read everything right :)
+1
R9 290x is a response to Titan/780, it's not a competitor for the upcoming 800 series aka Maxwell cards which should be 20nm, AMD will release their 20nm cards to compete with 800 series.
If you play games that use Mantle (atleast all games that use Frostbite 3) then AMD will probably outperform. By 3% or 30%? No one knows until december when the Mantle update for BF4 should be out.
Also, AMD has been developing Mantle for over 2 years, so it's not like NV would release their similar API next month.
Every driver and graphics API does that. That's what the computing ability is for. That much isn't new.
Mantle just allows that computing ability to be used exactly the way the developers want, within hardware limitations.