AMD releases its Titan killer, the Radeon R9 290X graphics card

This morning AMD released its highly anticipated flagship GPU, the Radeon R9 290X. The new R9 290X is claimed by AMD to be the "Ultimate GPU for a new era in PC Gaming," and is said to deliver breathtaking performance while retaining an affordable pricing point. If you want to skip this news post and see how the 290X stacks up, just head over to Shawn Baker's review of the new flagship.

The AMD R9 290X features the company's new Hawaii processor and is based on the Graphics Core Next architecture, which AMD says gives it unrivaled advantages over the competition. The new GPU features 2,816 stream processors, a engine clock up to 1GHz, and 4GB of GDDR5 memory. When you combine that with a 5Gbs memory clock, 320GB/s memory bandwidth you get a processing power of 5.6 Teraflops in a single GPU.

"As the pinnacle of our new AMD Radeon R9 Series graphics cards, the AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU embodies AMD's leadership as the ultimate graphics solution for an exceptional gaming experience, affirming that Radeonâ„¢ is gaming," said Matt Skynner, general manager and corporate vice president, AMD Graphics Business Unit. "The formidable combination of Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, Mantle and AMD TrueAudio technology raises the bar for breathtaking audio and graphics, and powerful performance, giving enthusiasts an unprecedented gaming experience."

AMD has built in its new True Audio technology into the 290X as well as including support for DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3 and AMD's own Mantle API, which is said to revolutionize PC gaming, making it easier for console developers to port games to the PC platform. AMD's Radeon R 290X is available today with a reference configuration MSRP of $549.