Sapphire Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X Unveiled – First Consumer Graphics Card With 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM

The Sapphire Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X features the AMD Hawaii XT GPU sporting 2816 Stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 Render back-ends and a 4 GB GDDR5 memory operating along a 512-bit bus interface. The core and memory frequencies were not mentioned but we are certain that the card would be clocked beyond the 1000 MHz mark for the core since the card is equipped with a non-reference PCB design which equates into greater stability and overclocking capabilities over the reference variant.

[DC777]

Sweet

[DeadManIV]

I just got the 280x version of this

[sashimi]

How much did you get yours for? i'm trying to build a PC at the moment but miners are inflating the prices like crazy.

[WeedyOne]

I thought miners had moved on to using Asic's to mine. They are much more efficient than an AMD GPU.

I dont think its miners driving up the price. I think that after mantle was announced and seeing that both consoles use AMD, a lot more people are buying AMD for gaming.

[frostypants]

Sweet. Now watch as the bitcoin miners drive the price through the stratosphere.

[starchild]

True. I can sell my HD 7950 for more today than how much I bought it for. The HD 7950 is still considered the best card for mining.

But I don't think I am going to sell it just yet since it is doing a wonderful job in all the next gen games I have played so far. I'm getting a solid 60fps in Thief with everything maxed out and 2xSSAA. I'm really pleased with it.

[jerethdagryphon]

Gpu isn't really any use for mining anymore unless you run 30 -4G cards 7970 only give 500-700 mega hash. You need 10s of gigahash to turn any profit

[ATi_Elite]

my Gigabyte HD7970 Crossfire still kicks major arse.

Vapor X cards are sweet though. Hats off to Sapphire as they have been pumping out high quality AMD cards for a while now.

off to see some benchmarks.

[Software_Lover]

8gb............ and will still come in cheaper than the Titan probably.

[sungam3d]

ram is cheap... and somewhat useless over 2-3gb
No game that I know of can utilise over 2gb of vram.

Sure you have an 8gb card, but wtf can you use all that ram for?

It's like having a Bugatti in New York.
Sure nice awesome car, has huge potential, fast as shit, but not much fun driving around at 30mph. And watch out for those speed humps!

[LAWSON72]

Well it depends on res from what I have seen 2GB for 1080p, 3GB for 1440p, and probably for 4k 4GB+. I have seen a couple of instances where 2GB is not enough, insane textures in Titanfall require 3GB of RAM (I tryed my 2GB GTX 760 and it is unplayable) and I have seen benchmarks where SLI 2GB GTX 760 has FPS problems at 1440p.

[starchild]

If you are running really high resolutions with massive texture mods in games like Skyrim I guess you might need over 3GB, but playing at 1920 x 1080 I haven't encountered any non-modded game that even uses 2gb of the 3gb found on my HD 7950.

[SniperControl]

@lawson 72

Huh? I have a backup PC with a vanilla GTX570 with 2gb of gddr5 which ran TF at full settings and @1440p with no problems whatsoever, FPS was around 50- 60 under stress.

There is nothing "insane" about the textures, I thought they were pretty average graphics tbh, pretty poor when compared to something like Bioshock Infinite.

My main PC has two overclocked Asus Black edition 4gb GTX670s in SLI, FPS ran well over 150, while typically Bioshock runs about 90 - 100.

[FlyingFoxy]

Regular r9 290 Tri-x is already as good as Nv's overpriced Titan in most games or better anyways.

I see little need for 8 gigs of ram. 4 is plenty for next gen.. after all the consoles have 3-4gb reserved for system ram alone, so 6gb of ddr3 and an r9 290 with its own 4gigs is more than enough.

[OwnageDC650]

Not sure what the point of 8 gigs on a card is. It's probably going to cost at least $800 because of high demand/mining and you would need to be running @ 4k and up resolutions with all kinds of AA to put some kind of dent. You would also need 3-4 R9-290X'S to run at good enough fps at those resolutions.

[FlyingFoxy]

3-4 cards bring deminishing returns though, it's pretty much a big waste of money. 4k is just not do-able yet at good fps. 1080p and 1440p is pretty much the limit if you want high fps with a single card or 2 at most.

[OwnageDC650]

3-4 cards bringing diminishing returns is part of my whole point. It's really not worth the cost. If you have the money to burn then all power to you. I'd rather wait for the next line of cards before I drop that kind of dough.

[SniperControl]

Totally agree, I have two Asus 4gb gtx 670 cards in sli, I tried a third in there, but only saw neglible returns in fps, certainly not worth the extra £420 for a 3 way sli.

[Yukicore]

Beautiful! With backplate and everything.

One of the prettiest open-type GPU designs I have seen, It looks as sweet as it looks aggressive and powerful.

[kingduqc]

Im fucking sick of those dirty peasent talking about vram or titan pricing. A titan is a cheap workstation card that offet you double precision compute.. that is why its ecpensive.

[RE_L_MAYER]

i have a ps4)

[ninjahunter]

unless your running 3 monitors its kinda useless, im pretty sure the witcher 2 didn't even use over 1gb at 1080p.

[Tzuno]

i pee on this card since is a waste of money and a trick.