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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SolMiester - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
There is no way Origin PC or any other OEM would want to put this reference card in there systems..I cant wait to see RMA stats with this card...AMD blew the card after such a great GPU...how many times will they do this?polaco - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
This is an interesting article too for gamers that are looking for 4K:http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-r9-290x-vs-...
dwade123 - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
All this shows is that GTX Titan is one efficient card. Better than both GTX 780 and AMD's offerings.ehpexs - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
Looks like AMD is a gen away from offereding a crossfire solution that can max out my triple crossovers @ 7680x1440Th-z - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
It seems AMD is pushing 290X really hard, to the point beyond its efficiency curve to try to win over larger chips with almost 1B more transistors from Nvidia. I wonder if reducing some ROPs and dedicate more die area to shader core may look like to 290X, or to go all in, designing a chip as large as Nvidia's top parts.Ytterbium - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
I'm sad they've gone to 1/8th FP, the 280X is a better compute card!Animalosity - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Why can't people just accept that AMD has beaten Nvidia in every shape and form this time. Yeah, its always been back and forth. And it will again in the future, but for now AMD has the crown for everything except for power/sound levels. Keep in mind that not only does AMD own both next gen consoles, they are also running every one of these benchmarks on beta drivers which means that they will only continue to get better. Add mantle to the equation and Titan will have absolutely zero purpose in life. It was a good card. RIP Kepler.Vortac - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Well, let's point out again that Titan has a much better FP64 performance, approx. 2.5x better than 290X, so "absolutely zero purpose" is not entirely correct. Of course, if you don't care about computing, then obviously 290X is a much better choice now.Luke7 - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Are you talking about this?http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/?d=qa&f=gpu_financ...
Vortac - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
In this interesting review Titan is pitted against 7970 which has 1/4 FP64 performance and is indeed very good for double precision calculations, especially with OpenCL. 290X has 1/8 FP64 and its double precision performance is worse than 7970, leaving Titan with some space to breathe.