What is AMD's equivalent of the 980?

[JEMC]

ofrm1 said:

JEMC said:

@ofrm1: AMD's R9 290 is also a good choice: it's cheaper than a 970 and almost as fast, plus with a non reference card heat is not a problem if your case has good ariflow. Yes, it's more power hungry, but unless you plan to run it for +10 years during several hours a day, it will still be cheaper than a 970.

I currently have a Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X in my system. It's a great card considering that the vapor-x line is the highest tier of R9 cards released. It barely breaks 70C under load, 75C under load when overclocked, and performs at about the same level as a reference 290X. Still, a 970 is a better solution in my eyes as it does run slightly better, and doesn't require a higher PSU. Also, it just seems as if the Maxwell series is more optimized for more games. There are several prominent games which the R9 series just doesn't seem to perform well under, likely because the games were designed with Nvidia's archetecture.

That's not because of the hardware but the software, and I'm not even talking about AMD's drivers here but the developers (specially Ubisoft) who have adopted Nvidia's GameWorks that, despite what they said, does hinder the performance of the games that use it on non Nvidia GPUs.