If these performance numbers posted by credible reviewers at OCUK hold up, then AMD could have a second, more affordable graphics card for you, which outperforms NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780, at least in synthetic benchmarks. In a brief performance run that spans synthetic tests, which included Unigine Heaven 3.0 at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, with normal level of tessellation; 3DMark 11 (performance preset) and 3DMark Fire Strike (both Normal and Extreme); the card we believe to be R9 290 (name blurred out in the graphs) is consistently faster than the GeForce GTX 780 reference, in the same bench.

Based on the same 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon as the Radeon R9 290X, the R9 290 is its more affordable sibling, featuring 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. It features clock speeds of 947 MHz (core), and 5.00 GHz (memory, GDDR5-effective). There's no word on pricing, but it could be available from the 31st of October, 2013.