The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Not unlike Crysis 3, this is another game where the R9 Nano is on guard against NVIDIA thanks to the sub-Fury performance. Overall performance is still plenty, cracking 90fps at 2560x1440, but none the less it trails the power-similar GTX 980. The upside for AMD here is that for the size-similar GTX 970 Mini, the R9 Nano is still easily in the lead.
As for minimums, not unlike Shadow of Mordor, the R9 Nano is in a tough spot. Even with the advantage of Mantle, it always delivers slightly lower minimums than the GTX 980.
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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.