The AMD Radeon R9 290X Review
by Ryan Smith on October 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
Crysis
Up next is our legacy title for 2013/2014, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 5 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA, never mind 2560 and beyond.
Unlike games such as Battlefield 3, AMD’s GCN cards have always excelled on Crysis: Warhead, and as a result at all resolutions and all settings the 290X tops our charts for single-GPU performance. At 2560 this is a 15% performance advantage for the 290X, pushing past GTX 780 and GTX Titan to be the only card to break into the 50fps range. While at 4K that’s a 22% performance advantage, which sees 290X and Titan become the only cards to even crack 40fps.
But of course if you want 60fps in either scenario, you need two GPUs. At which point 290X’s initial performance advantage, coupled with its AFR scaling advantage (77/81% versus 70%) only widens the gap between the 290X CF and GTX 780 SLI. Though either configuration will get you above 60fps in either resolution.
Meanwhile the performance advantage of the 290X over the 280X is lower here than it is in most games. At 2560 it’s just a 26% gain, a bit short of the 30% average.290X significantly bulks up on everything short of memory bandwidth and rasterization versus 280X, so the list of potential bottlenecks is relatively short in this scenario.
Interestingly, despite the 290X’s stellar performance when it comes to average framerates, the performance advantage with minimum framerates is more muted. 290X still beats GTX 780, but only by 4% at 2560. We’re not CPU bottlenecked, as evidenced by the AFR scaling, so there’s something about Crysis that leads to the 290X crashing a bit harder in the most strenuous scenes.
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Ytterbium - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
It's kind of funny that for computer your better off buying the lower down 280X cards, I guess that AMD saw what NVidia did with the Titan and though we'll have some of that, they'll be a pronsumer card with 1/4 FP for $1000SolMiester - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
You obviously dont know 780Ti is coming! hell, even OC 780 is better than current Titan which is PROsumer for CUDA dev...that why it has different model naming..Anyway, if you can keep the 290x under 94c without throttling, it is indeed a great card, however the review I have seen with sustained gaming have it throttling up to -30%
motqalden - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Lol R9 290X CF "Uber" 66.6 dB(A)Go Red Team ^.^
>.> 666 + Red team
Remember. Competition is a good thing!
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
And I ran that test 3 times to make sure it wasn't a fluke. It really is 66.6dB(A).faster - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
SOFT LAUNCH Too bad the cards aren't available anywhere from 10/24/2013 to 10/27/2013 besides a handful on the first day that went to the lucky 100.AnnihilatorX - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
Minor typo:The closest we came to a problem was with the intro videos for Total War: Rome 2, which have black horizontal lines due to the cards trying to the cards trying to AFR render said video at a higher framerate than it played at.
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
Thanks.AnnihilatorX - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
I do hope 3rd party has more support watercooling, there is a gap in market for affordable prebuilt CPU with water blocks.muziqaz - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
On release date in ocUK website there were i think 2 cards with prebuilt watercooling block for available. So I guess watercooling is being supported ;)AnnihilatorX - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
oops, CPU-->GPU