The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTThe Talos Principle
Croteam’s first person puzzle and exploration game The Talos Principle may not involve much action, but the game’s lush environments still put even fast video cards to good use. Coupled with the use of 4x MSAA at Ultra quality, and even a tranquil puzzle game like Talos can make a good case for more powerful video cards.
With the Talos Principle the R9 Nano is once again looking good. Performance relative to the R9 Fury X slips a bit more than in the past, now trailing the fastest Fiji by about 15%, while the card trails the slower R9 Fury by 4% at 2560x1440 and 7% at 3840x2160. At least within the AMD lineup, the only other thing of note here is the R9 390X, which is never too far away from the R9 Nano (just at substantially more power).
Otherwise to make our usual size and power comparisons, everything is in AMD’s favor. The R9 Nano is well ahead of the GTX 970 Mini, beating it by 35% even at the worse for AMD resolution of 1920x1080. Similarly, the R9 Nano enjoys a 10%+ lead over the power-similar GTX 980, with the lead growing with the resolution.
Finally, we haven’t made too many R9 285 (Tonga) comparisons, so let’s throw one of those in. Like GTX 980, R9 285 is fairly close to R9 Nano in power consumption. However for performance it’s no contest; the R9 Nano nearly doubles the performance of the R9 285 under this game.
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LoneWolf15 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
And as someone who has been a long time TR reader and has met him multiple times, I am in complete disagreement with you. His testing is some of the most detailed and accurate that I know.I have little faith in your ability to determine someone's subliminal gifts.
Kutark - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Unfortunately a great many people are incapable of projecting their own biases onto someone else. Tomshardware and Anandtech have been accused of being pro one team or the other for years.I remember an article i read a few years back, i wish i could remember the guys name, but he was chief editor for one of the macintosh magazines, and he was talking about how he got so fed up with users because if he said literally anything negative about the product he would get his email inbox blown up with accusations of being a MS nutswinger, and fellating Bill Gates, and various other things. He gave an example of one of the ipods which he gave like a 90%+ review, and the ONLY negative things he said was that the casing was shiny, so it took fingerprints really well and was hard to keep looking clean, and that he wished the battery life was a little bit longer. He said he got the most vitriolic and ridiculous emails he'd ever seen.
The problem is people want confirmation that they made the right choice, and if they don't get that, then rather than admit that they made a mistake, they would rather attack the reviewer as being a fanboy or something equally hideous.
medi03 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
In Fermi times Anand found it "appropriate" to compare cherry picked OCed nVidia card vs stock AMD."Subtle bias" my ass.
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It's something we've apologized for, repeatedly. It was a poor idea and we readily admit as much.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3988/the-use-of-evga...
mapesdhs - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
I never saw the need to apologise; the price of the FTW meant it was the far better choice to buy back then (I bought two for SLI).fuicharles - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
I used to go to The Tech Reports to read the Top News contents everyday. Their Top News was always updated and shared lots of recent development.However, recently something fishy, Tech Reports doesn't share any news on the recent Gamesworks and Asyn Compute tragedy in their sites.
And try to pin point the Pump Whine problem even after AMD has already come up new revision of Fury Card which solve the problems.
I don't want to believe Scott Wasson is biased either, but isn't that as a journalist you should share the bad/good for both camp to let the readers judge themselves
milli - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
'most detailed and accurate' ≠ unbiasedDon't worry that you didn't notice the hidden bias. It took me a while to realize it. After reading TR for a couple years, around 2006 I started noticing the bias. It's not what he says that's biased but what he doesn't say/report that makes him biased. He's smart.
Well he's getting better at hiding his bias these last years. In the previous decade he would often pit OC'd nVidia cards with stock AMD cards in his 'reviews'.
Just like many knew that Anand was biased towards Apple with his ridiculously positive reviews until the final proof came when he went to actually work for them.
slickr - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
He has been shilling for Nvidia for good several years now, everything Nvidia does = great, amazing, unique, always winning in some ultra specific aspect even if realistically the card is garbage, when he talks about AMD = power consumption is 10W or 20W more than Nvidia, Nvidia clear winner, price and performance don't matter, only those 10W difference matters.No way for AMD to win, I would have not sent review copies to a whole more websites, there are at least 4-5 of top of my head that are Nvidia shill town and they not even doing it subtly.
althaz - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
nVidia have had a lead in performance for half a decade or more now - it's not tech reviewers fault that AMD are using more power to deliver worse performance at similar prices.chrnochime - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
And we're suppose to have faith in YOUR view of SW? LOL