The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
Thief
Our newest addition to our benchmark suite is Eidos Monreal’s stealth action game, Thief. Set amidst a Victorian-era fantasy environment, Thief is an Unreal Engine 3 based title which makes use of a number of supplementary Direct3D 11 effects, including tessellation and advanced lighting. Adding further quality to the game on its highest settings is support for SSAA, which can eliminate most forms of aliasing while bringing even the most powerful video cards to their knees.
Our first major review with Thief finds AMD taking a small lead at 2160p, with NVIDIA returning the favor at 1440p. In the case of 1440p both the AMD and NVIDIA setups are able to deliver well over 60fps (despite the heavy use of SSAA at this setting), while at 2160p even the 295X2 falls just a hair short of cracking 60fps even with the slightly lower quality settings.
Meanwhile when it comes to minimum framerates, while AMD and NVIDIA are close together at 1440p and 2160p with Low quality settings, moving to 2160p with High quality settings pretty much busts the NVIDIA SLI setup. It’s difficult to say for sure on the basis of a single SLI setup, but it looks like the memory requirements at these settings may be overwhelming the 3GB NVIDIA cards, especially in light of the GTX Titan Black’s unusual performance lead over the GTX 780 Ti. The additional buffer handling for SLI further eats into the pool of memory available for these cards, which in turn further hamstrings performance.
On the other hand, other than the GTX 780 SLI’s initial bottoming out in this benchmark, NVIDIA does deliver stronger frame pacing performance. In both cases the 295X2 delivers acceptable consistency, staying under 20% variance, but it’s still a wider degree of variance than what we’re seeing with the GTX 780 Ti SLI setup.
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extide - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Did you misread the article? They are simply comparing the frame pacing on the old stuff to the new stuff. Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to properly comprehend english, which is pretty damn sad if you ask me. Thus, a lot of people are either mistakenly thinking that this card has bad frame pacing, or that this review had anything to do with the frame pacing updates for GCN 1.0. NEITHER of those things are the case!JDG1980 - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
These two different things really shouldn't have been in the same article. It's confusing, unfocused, and comes off as taking cheap shots at AMD over an old product. Let's be honest, there weren't many 7990s sold in the first place, and anyone who bought one for gaming and was disappointed with it could have resold it during the mining craze and at least broken even, if not actually turning a profit. A review of a new product isn't the best place to say "Old product X is still not perfect".srsbsns - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Are the Battlefield 4 benchmarks using mantle or directx?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Direct3D.Blitzninjasensei - Saturday, July 12, 2014 - link
Ryan, would you be able to do a comparison with Mantle as well as D3D? I would like to see how much the benefit is.iamkyle - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
So...they're taking the Prescott approach to performance?"Bigger!!! Faster!!! Hotter!!!"
Sounds like some Core2 Duo-type innovation is needed by AMD here to get temps and power down to a reasonable level here.
Mondozai - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Temperatures are out of control?Can you even read a basic chart or is that too much for your tiny little head to handle?
Da W - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Great EVGA GTX 780 superclocked to sell!Reason: bought too soon, i want this dual GPU bitch!
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I'll buy it. my 550ti is getting a little long in the toothMondozai - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Basically, for a few hundred dollars you are paying a premium on noise and GPU load compared to 2 R9-290X in Crossfire.While this card has a frame pacing improvement that is massive compared to 7990, it still trails 780 Ti in SLI. Although the 780 Ti is painfully gimped on 4K resolutions due to VRAM bottlenecks.
Maxwell's high-end cards in SLI is going to be beastly, since Nvidia is finally going to resolve the VRAM issue.