The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
Crysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.
Crysis 3 is another title that regular favors NVIDIA cards, and despite AMD being able to close the gap through superior Crossfire scaling the 295X2 still trails the GTX 780 Ti SLI at all resolutions. That said, AMD does at least make it relatively close, and all the while manages to crack 60fps at 2160p with Medium settings, which is about as good as any dual-GPU setup can hope for in Crysis 3 right now.
When it comes to our look at frame pacing, Crysis 3 is the one game where even the XDMA-equipped 295X2 is struggling to meet our own standards for acceptable frame pacing. Our normal threshold here is 20%, which the 295X2 just misses. The remaining difference is under 2% and in all likelihood should not be a significant problem for smoothness (it certainly hasn’t been an issue in our testing), but nonetheless it’s a game that could stand to see further improvements in AMD’s drivers.
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mpdugas - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Time for two power supplies in this kind of build...rikm - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
huh?, no giveaway? why do I read this stuff?ok, seriously, love these reviews, but the thing I never understand is when they say Titan is better, but the charts seem to say the opposite, at least for compute.
lanskywalker - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
That card is a sexy beast.jimjamjamie - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Great effort from AMD, I wish they would focus on efficiency though - I feel with the changing computing climate and the shift to mobile that power-hungry components should be niche, not the norm.Basically, a dual-750ti card would be lovely :)
IUU - Saturday, April 12, 2014 - link
The sad thing about all this, is that the lowest resolution for these cards is considered to be the 2560x1440 one(for those who understand).Bigger disappointment yet, that after so many years of high expectations, the gpu still stands as a huge piece of silicon inside the pc that's firmly chained by the IT industry to serve gamers only.
Whatever the reason for no such consumer applications,thiis is a crime, mildly put.
RoboJ1M - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
The 4870 stories that were written here by Anand were my most memorable and favourite.That and the SSD saga.
Everybody loves a good Giant Killer story.
But the "Small Die Strategy" has long since ended?
When did that end?
Why did that end? I mean, it worked so well, didn't it?
patrickjp93 - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
People should be warned: the performance of this card is nowhere close to what the benchmarks or limited tests suggest. Even on the newest Asrock Motherboard the PCI v3 lanes bottleneck this about 40%. If you're just going to sequentially transform the same data once it's on the card, yes, you have this performance, which is impressive for the base cost, though entirely lousy for the Flop/Watt. But, if you're going to attempt to be moving 8GB of data to and from the CPU and GPU continuously, this card performs marginally better than the 290. The busses are bridge chips are going to need to get much faster for these cards to be really useful for anything outside purely graphical applications in the future. It's pretty much a waste for GPGPU computing.patrickjp93 - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
*The busses AND bridge chips...* Seriously what chat forum doesn't let you edit your comments?Gizmosis350k - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
I wonder if Quad CF works with theseBlitzninjasensei - Saturday, July 12, 2014 - link
I'm trying to imagine what kind of person would have 4 of these and why, maybe EyeFinity with 4k? Even then your CPU would bottleneck way before that, you would need some kind of motherboard with dual CPU slots and a game that can take advantage of it.