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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SirRaulo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Game changer!A faster card and $100 cheaper... even an nvidia fanboy would know the difference.... wait, a fanboy wouldnt... too bad.
willis936 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
The game has changed twice a year for the past 20 years. If the change isn't changing one could argue that the game is staying the same.apaceeee - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Er...I don't think so ..polaco - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I have seen you used AMD Catalyst 13.11 (Beta 5) in the 290X benchmarks. Maybe would be nice if you can post some with the updated revision as they say to improve performance from 8% to 30% in several games.http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/lat...
Thanks!
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Those are versus Catalyst 13.9. There are no performance improvements in our game set between 13.11 v5 and v6.polaco - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Oh, ok if you say so. I got confused coz in one place it states that explicitly and in the other does not."Performance improvements for the AMD APU Series (comparing AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 to AMD Catalyst 13.9)" in the other place doesn't make that clarification just
"Performance improvements"
wiyosaya - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Personally, I think it would have been interesting to see a GTX 580 thrown in for the compute benchmarks.rogerthat1945 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
The ASUS GTX 780 went up in price $120+ USD for me last night when I was expecting a price drop thids morning.Last week (and all last month at least, the ASUS GTX 780 price was around $745 USD (in Yen) on Amazon Jp.
I put one in my shoping basket, and browsed some more for extra items (Zx Evo Headset considerations), and then heard about the NVidia cards price to be dropped for the GTX 780 range; so I held off going to checkout; however, this morning when I went to look at paying via the advertised price drop, BUT I found that Amazon have JACKED-UP the price to $867 US. :no:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/ASUSTeK-GTX780%E3%83%81%E3...
Question is;-
"Where can I buy this card for a `proper` price (which popular site) where they will POST it via Air Mail to Japan (not a US military address)? :ange:
Every site I tried from California to China do not post to Japan.
Amazon Japan, you are Kraaayyy-Zee crayon users. :pt1cable:
photek242 - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
Now i have a GTX 680 sli setup i think to sell the 2 cards and buy a AMD R290xOr stay with the sli setup?
Here in belgium the r290x goes between 465 - 550 euro
Tia
muziqaz - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
Ryan, I don't know if you are still reading this or not, but regarding Vegas Pro, I suppose other codecs do not use GPUs as expected. I use mp4 format and even though sony and AMD are telling me that GPUs do accelerate that format it actually do not. I can't even get my 12 thread CPU to be loaded fully. Or maybe there is another codec which is supported by youtube which might get some GPU acceleration if enabled? maybe someone else can pitch in with suggestions? :)