The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
At 3840x2160 we see the R9 Nano only barely fall behind the R9 Fury, trailing it by less than a percent. Unfortunately R9 Nano can’t quite make 60fps here, which for AMD is limited to the R9 Fury X.
The problem for AMD here is that in lieu of hitting 60fps at 4K, the next best option is to drop down to 2560x1440, at which point AMD’s CPU limitations come into full force, allowing the GTX 980 to leapfrog the entire Fiji family. Ultimately this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s a greater problem for a luxury card like the R9 Nano.
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Kutark - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I can only wish LAN parties were still a thing. Some of my fondest memories was playing aliens vs predator, or CoD2/Quake/UT/etc.FMinus - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
I'll be honest here, performance vs. price wise this is kind of meh, but the form factor is absolutely amazing. I just wish most cards would be trimmed down to that form factor, it is clearly doable as demonstrated here, maybe not right now, but the future is open. While they're at it, they might start looking at how to make those cards single slot again, that would be my wet dream.vhawkxi - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
A great compact card - Installed it on my Intel 4GHz i7-6700K CPU based machine and for what I do with it, it is super. I am not a first-person-shooter fan - for RPG type of games (Myst, Riven) and music production with Avid programs it is more than adequate. Worth the $700 CAD I paid for it.Rehmanpa - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Mind I ask how you guys got your 980 ti to render on Sony vegas pro? I can't get mine to render and I wad hoping you could share how you guys got yours to work. Thanks.