The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
The Test
Starting with today’s article we’ve made a small change to our suite of games. We are replacing our last 2012 game, Hitman: Absolution with another Square Enix title: the recently released Thief. Both games make use of many of the same graphical features, and both games include a built-in benchmark that is a good approximation of what a worst case rendering load in the game will behave like, making Thief a solid replacement for the older Hitman.
Meanwhile we’ve also updated all of our benchmark results to reflect the latest drivers from AMD and NVIDIA. For all AMD cards we are using AMD’s R9 295X2 launch drivers, Catalyst 14.4. Catalyst 14.4 appears to be a new branch of AMD’s drivers, given the version number 14.100, however we have found very few performance changes in our tests.
As for NVIDIA cards, we’re using the just-launched 337.50 drivers. These drivers contain a collection of performance improvements for NVIDIA cards and coincidentally come at just the right time for NVIDIA to counter AMD’s latest product launch.
We also need to quickly note that because AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2 uses an external 120mm radiator, we’ve had to modify our testbed to house the card. For our R9 295X2 tests we have pulled our testbed’s rear 140mm fan and replaced it with the R9 295X2 radiator. All other tests have the 140mm fan installed as normal.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 AMD Radeon HD 7990 AMD Radeon HD 6990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Black NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 337.50 Beta AMD Catalyst 14.4 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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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.