We’re cranking away in the lab, benchmarking AMD’s Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Typically, that means you wouldn’t hear a peep from me until launch day.

That's the R9 290X with Tomb Raider at 3840x2160

Presumably as a counter to Nvidia’s press event, which is currently happening in Montreal, however, the company is giving me the go-ahead to publish a couple of my results a bit early.

AMD was very specific that the only numbers it’s approving come from BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider. We’re only able to show you R9 290X compared to GeForce GTX 780, and only at 3840x2160. But despite those limitations, these numbers were run in our lab, on our own equipment.

We could have dialed this one back a bit, but because Tomb Raider moves a little slower, and because this benchmark sequence is both very demanding and highly repeatable, I wasn’t bothered by the R9 290X’s performance, but was impressed by what I was seeing at Ultra HD.

I backed off a bit in BioShock Infinite, although the Very High detail preset still looks great. As you can see, Radeon R9 290X has little trouble posting higher average frame rates yet again. It’s worth noting that these are Fraps-based numbers—in single-GPU configurations, the results from Fraps and FCAT track closely anyway.

There’s not much more I can say at this point, except that I have several cards tested at 3840x2160, and R9 290X doesn’t just do well against the GeForce GTX 780…

With that, I should probably get back to the lab before I get myself into trouble.