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[Matt]

If the rumors are right, we should be able to learn about AMD's new toy in a few hours.

I'm going to guess $550 and that it'll benchmark about at parity with Titan.

I've been running nVidia for the last few generations, but I don't think too much of their $1000 Titan move, so it'd be great to see some more competition.

[6233638]

The video card market is so underwhelming these days, just like CPUs, because AMD is not giving Intel or Nvidia any real competition.

As I understood it, when the Titan was introduced, it was supposed to be an early preview of what the 700-series cards were going to deliver, positioned as the top-end 600-series card above the 690.
Instead, due to AMD no longer being competitive, it ended up as the top-end 700-series card. The card being sold today as the GTX 780 was originally planned to be the GTX 760.

Due to higher-than-expected sales of the Titan, Nvidia used this as an opportunity to push up the prices of their entire range.
I don't know about US pricing, but the 480/580/680 used to be a $600 card and that was as expensive as it got for a single GPU. Now the 780 is an $800 card, and the Titan is $1300.
The 760/770 are about $100 more than they used to be.

Hopefully the R9 290X will help push down prices, but it's a $700 card here, and AMD's cards have always been about $100 less than Nvidia on the high end.
It seems to be somewhere between a 780 and a Titan depending on the games, so they're still playing catch-up rather than taking a solid lead, and Nvidia replacing the 780 with the 780 Ti should be enough to take care of that.

I just can't help feel that the 800 series (Q1 '14) is going to be a disappointment as a result, bringing efficiency improvements rather than big performance gains, just like Ivy Bridge/Haswell.
And I still wonder how anything but the Titan is going to handle the ports from the next generation consoles. The PS4 has 5GB GDDR5 available to developers, and this card only has 4GB VRAM.
It's probably going to be fine, because that 5GB is a shared resource and is not all used for VRAM, but I can't help wondering if it's going to cause problems further down the line as games are more optimized for that platform.

[Matt]

It looks like the 290X is the value champ, if you can call anything that expensive a value.  It runs with Titan at normal resolutions, runs away at 4k, and costs about half as much.

But the idle power numbers are a little scary.  It draws over twice the power of a Titan at idle, making it a less good choice for a silent audio computer, HTPC, or server that runs all the time (assuming you want to game once in a while on any of those machines):
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-29.html

[6233638]

All it really shows to me is that they're pushing that architecture too far, in order to try and compete with the Titan.
But a 780 already competes with the Titan, and can beat a Titan once you start overclocking. The 780 Ti replaces the 780 at the same price, which means the price difference between the regular 780 and R9 290X will be a lot smaller once it has been released.
But that's how it has always been - you buy AMD if you can't afford Nvidia.

And the R9 290X is only competitive with a Titan in "uber" mode, which aims to keep the card at 95℃!
Something else few people seem to be mentioning, is that AMD are only allowing OEMs to produce reference cards - they are not allowed to replace the coolers.

R9 290X cooler vs GTX Titan under load: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY5fU9mcX4w


One thing few reviews have mentioned though, which I am interested in hearing more about, is the "TrueAudio" feature. As someone that uses headphones for gaming, this sounded rather interesting.
If that's a worthwhile feature, I'd consider adding an R7 260X to my system. (this new naming scheme is the worst!)