AMD has been doing quite a good job in keeping details regarding its upcoming Volcanic Islands GPU lineup well hidden and only a few days before the "official unveil" we have first alleged pictures and benchmarks of the new flagship. Of course and as always, you should take these with a grain of salt as we are yet to see any official details regarding the new GPUs. According to first details, the Hawaii R9-290X is doing quite well and is even faster than the Nvidia GTX Titan which puts AMD in a really good spot, especially considering that they are aiming at much lower price point.

The first picture was leaked by Johan Andersson, Technical Director of Dice's Frostbite Engine and we are quite sure that one is real considering the fact that EA/DICE and its upcoming Battlefield 4 game will most likly be a big part of the upcoming AMD launch. The rest of the details were leaked by Chiphell.com and include full specifications, bunch of pictures including the bare PCB as well as a set of benchmark slides showing that R9-290X GPU flagship will definitely put a lot of pressure on Nvidia.

The Hawaii flagship GPU will be based on a 28nm manufacturing process and have a larger die size when compared to the Tahiti GPU but it will still end up around 30 percent smaller than Nvidia's GK110 GPU. According to early details, it packs 4 Compute Units (CUs) with 11 SMIDs per CU, which adds up to 44 SMIDs or 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs and 44 ROPs. The GPU is paired up with 4GB of GDDR5 memory that is paired up with a massive 512-bit memory interface. It has a 300W TDP design which means it will need a 8+6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. It also comes with two DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

Clock wise, the AMD R9-290X graphics card works at 800MHz base with 1000MHz+ Turbo while memory is at anywhere between 1125 and 1250MHz (4.5 to 5.0GHz). The new AMD R9-290X flagship should be available in mid-October 2013 and recent details, including official interview, suggest that AMD will not be targeting the same US $999 price point as the GTX Titan but would rather go US $599-649 price range, considering its current lineup.

In benchmarks at 1080p and 1600p, the AMD Hawaii R9-290X is faster than both the Geforce GTX 780 and well as the GTX Titan in Alien vs Predator 3 and Battlefield 3 but still lags just a bit behind the Titan in Crysis as well as the 3DMark FireStrike benchmark. Of course, these are still unofficial results and we are not sure if benchmarks were done on AMD's final driver and if that one was even released to reviewers.

In any case, we will know for sure on September 25th, when AMD is scheduled to officially unveil the new Volcanic Islands GPU series on the island of Hawaii.











Source: Chiphell.com, via Wccftech.com.