Radeon R9 290 (non-X) Launch Pushed Back a Week

Launch of AMD's Radeon R9 290 (non-X) is reportedly pushed back by a week, to Tuesday, November 5, 2013. The card was expected to launch on October 31, 2013. The reason for this delay? AMD reportedly developed a new driver that significantly improves performance on the R9 290. AMD pushed this driver onto reviewers at the last minute, and asked them to re-bench their R9 290 samples from scratch, extending their NDA till the 5th. The driver reportedly makes the R9 290 extremely competitive with GeForce GTX 780. A side-effect of that would be that the recently launched Radeon R9 290X could be rendered unattractive. It remains to be seen if the driver also proportionately improves performance on the R9 290X, and how AMD ends up pricing the R9 290.

http://www.techpowerup.com/193497/radeon-r9-290-non-x-launch-pushed-back-a-week.html