AMD Claims Upcoming R9 290X Will Trounce GTX 780 In 4K Gaming, Offers Benchmarks

AMD is holding an event / demo in Montreal today, offering to let anyone who likes come in, check out 4K gaming on their upcoming graphics card, and promising that the GPU will deliver performance over and above anything Nvidia's GTX 780 can offer. 4K gaming has increasingly become popular -- or at least, discussed, as monitors begin to debut at that resolution and modifications to the Blu-ray standard are floated. AMD has run two tests, which it claims demonstrates this performance -- BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider.

There are two caveats I want to mention, one for each game. For the BioShock Infinite results, AMD doesn't specify if they're running the game with or without its alternate depth of field option. This setting has a significant impact on AMD GPU performance -- a Radeon 7990 running at 1920x1080 benchmarks at 116 FPS in DX11 Ultra mode, and 106 FPS in DX11 w/ Alternate DoF. That 10% gap, if applicable here, would significantly reduce the results between the two cards.

In Tomb Raider, AMD ran the test using TressFX. Again, that's a perfectly valid way to test the game -- it's not a hack, a cheat, or a flaw -- but TressFX performs rather better on AMD cards than their NV counterparts. The difference is unlikely to account for the entire performance delta between the two solutions, but it's worth being aware of.

In either case, the larger point is that 4K gaming is slowly coming into range, even if only at the very top of the market. In a few more years, we may see more reasonable price points -- and and of course, even higher-performing solutions debuting at the top of the range. Look for the R9 290X to debut in the near future, with full coverage and benchmarks of it, right here.