The GeForce GTX Titan blew us all away eight months ago with its mindblowingly fast GPU, cramming 7080 million transistors into a 561mm2 die to provide massive processing power and bandwidth. The catch, of course, was that Nvidia wanted (and still wants) $1,000 for it -- a sum that didn't necessarily seem to prevent cards from flying off shelves even though it's more than our entire entry-level rig.

Nvidia followed up three months later with the equally impressive GTX 780 for a more plausible $650, where it remains today. Neither of those cards had much of an impact on AMD's sales as the company's most expensive offering at the time was a $450 Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (the 7990 arrived a few months later).

Eagerly awaiting AMD's response, we were disappointed that the first run of Rx 200 cards were rebadges. For instance, the R7 260X and R9 270X are the Radeon HD 7790 and 7870 overclocked, while the R9 280X is an underclocked version of the HD 7970 GHz Edition -- an equivalency chart can be found in our previous Radeon R7/R9 review. We were less than impressed.