First official benches put R9 290X ahead of GTX 780

AMD has given the greenlight for a handful of tech sites to publish what are the first official benchmarks for its as-of-yet unannounced R9 290X graphics card.

The headline is that it seems to beat Nvidia’s GTX 780 (which is its second highest performing card behind only the Titan) by a margin of up to 13 per cent.

There are a number of caveats that should be noted before anyone gets too excited, however.

Firstly, numbers have only been revealed for two games – BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider, both of which are AMD Gaming Evolved titles meaning that they should already theoretically enjoy stronger performance on AMD cards.

Note too that results were only published for performance at 4K resolutions. You would perhaps expect the 290X to perform better under these conditions thanks to its comparatively high number of cores and its memory size.

The bigger question is whether these results will be repeated when playing at more standard resolutions such as 1080p and 1440p and of course with other titles.