AMD fixes poor R9 290X performance with driver update

Earlier this week reports hit the web that AMD's Radeon R9 290X suffered from poor performance. Tom's Hardware guide discovered a massive difference in performance between their press sample and an actual retail sample from Newegg, leading the site to belief that AMD may have send out golden samples to the press.

AMD investigated the issue and claims the difference in performance is caused by a variability in fan speeds across R9 290 series boards. The company issued Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2 to fix the variance of fan speed.

Hello, We've identified that there's variability in fan speeds across AMD R9 290 series boards. This variability in fan speed translates into variability of the cooling capacity of the fan-sink. The flexibility of AMD PowerTune technology enables us to correct this variability in a driver update. This update will normalize the fan RPMs to the correct values.

The correct target RPM values are 2200RPM for the AMD Radeon R9 290X "Quiet mode", and 2650RPM for the R9 290. You can verify these in GPU-Z. If you're working on stories relating to R9 290 series products, please use this driver as it will reduce any variability in fan speeds. This driver will be posted publicly tonight.

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.2 Driver for Windows:

??Call of Duty®: Ghost - Improves anti-aliasing performance, and updates the AMD CrossFire™ profile

AMD Radeon™ R9 290 Series - PowerTune update to reduce variance of fan speed / RPM

Resolves intermittent crashes seen in legacy DirectX®? 9 applications