The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.

At Bioshock’s highest quality settings the game generally favors NVIDIA’s GPUs, particularly since NVIDIA’s most recent driver release. As a result we’ll see the 295X2 come up short of 60fps on Ultra quality at 2160p, and otherwise trail the GTX 780 Ti SLI at both 2160p and 1440p. However it’s interesting to note that at 2160p with Medium quality – a compromise setting mostly for testing single-GPU setups at this resolution – we see the 295X2 jump ahead of NVIDIA’s best, illustrating the fact that what’s ultimately dragging down AMD’s performance in this game is a greater degree of bottlenecking with Bioshock’s Ultra quality effects.

Meanwhile our first set of frame pacing benchmarks has more or less set the stage. Thanks to its XDMA engine the 295X2 is able to deliver acceptable frame pacing performance at both 1440p and 2160p, though at 1440p in particular NVIDIA does technically fare better than AMD here. As for the Radeon HD 7990, this offers a solid example of how AMD’s older GCN 1.0 based dual-GPU card still has great difficulty with frame pacing at higher resolutions.