Prices for AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 290X just keep on plummeting. Mere days after Nvidia unveiled its new GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards, AMD’s hardware partners slashed the cost of many R9 290X models to $400—a triple-digit cut from its previous price. (Other Radeon cards received similar price cuts.) Checking Amazon and Newegg this morning, however, at least two R9 290X models are selling for $299.99 after rebate, and several others are sporting sticker prices between that and $370.
Nvidia’s new GTX 900-series behemoths generally outperform AMD’s year-old R9-series video cards in both frame rate and power efficiency, but the Radeon R9 290X still spits out graphics sure to make any PC gamer very happy—it’s easily still one of the most powerful graphics cards available. What’s more, AMD’s top-tier Radeon cards support the performance-enhancing Mantle technology and come with three free games, including popular titles like Alien: Isolation, Sniper Elite 3, Saints Row IV, various Star Citizen modules, and many, many more. (You can choose from 27 games, in fact.)
And yes, those dirt-cheap $300 models are still eligible for the free games, as well.
Check out our graphics card slug-fest comparing AMD and Nvidia’s most powerful video cards to see how the beefiest single-GPU graphics card in the land stack up. You’ll find a slew of benchmark results and a lengthy discussion about price considerations and extra features. No matter how compelling Nvidia’s new cards are—and they are indeed—snagging a new R9 290X and three games for $300 is an outrageously good deal.
The impact on you at home: AMD can’t unveil its next-gen GPUs quickly enough, but the price war being waged in the meantime is driving high-end graphics capabilities down to very affordable levels. That’s nothing but a good thing for PC gamers.