The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTDragon Age: Inquisition
Our RPG of choice for 2015 is Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest game in the Dragon Age series of ARPGs. Offering an expansive world that can easily challenge even the best of our video cards, Dragon Age also offers us an alternative take on EA/DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, which powers this game along with Battlefield 4.
Compared to the R9 Fury series, the R9 Nano delivers around 87-95% of the performance of AMD’s other flagship cards, once again similar to what we’ve seen in prior games and showing just how close the R9 Nano is to the R9 Fury is in performance so much of the time. Meanwhile in a size-wise comparison the R9 Nano always holds the lead as well, though the lead gets rather thin – around 7% - at 1920x1080.
The big hurdle for the R9 Nano is the power comparison, which once again sees the power-similar GTX 980 eeking out AMD’s latest Fiji card, especially at lower resolutions. Nothing here is all that surprising given what we saw with R9 Fury back in July, but it’s a reminder of how close things can be in some of these games.
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SeanJ76 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
AMD is about to claim bankruptcy......silverblue - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Somebody just bought 20% of their shares. If you want them to file chapter 11, be a little more patient, grasshopper.close - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Guess Nvidia is dead to you as a brand also for the whole 3.5GB issue (which we all know how well was handled). That leaves you with the Intel iGPU. But some people have the little fetish of being crapped on from a single direction.Saying "they're dead to me as a brand" is the same as saying "from now on I will disconsider their offerings even if they may be better value or simply better". And this does you no favors, trust me.
Azix - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Does AMD not give out review guidelines? It seems that's something nvidia does. eg when the Ashes benchmark came out they told review sites not to use AA, a lot didn't. Maybe AMD figures some sites will ignore this guidance. eg. if they said nano was not to be compared to the 980ti or fury X and was a niche product for small cases, some sites like kitguru would still compare it to a 980ti rather than the closest mini GPUgw74 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
It is none of the companies' business how their products are reviewed. Their only business to make good products. Anyone can compare anything they like to anything else and benchmark it using anything they want.ianmills - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I wish it was but even anandtech falls in line with this and overuses company's marketing terms to make it hard to compare to previous generationsRyan Smith - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Interesting. I'm certainly not trying to "fall in line" or otherwise use specific marketing terms, so if I'm doing that then it's unplanned. What terms have I been using, so that I can watch out for it in the future?Alexvrb - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Yeah! Tell em gw! Same with automotive testing. No guidelines, no rules! If they loan you a 1-ton pickup truck and you compare it to sports cars on a twisty track, bash the truck and give it a horrible review for "poor handling vs 500K exotic sports cars" - well that's none of their business!/sarcasm
gw74 - Sunday, September 13, 2015 - link
I am talking about no guidelines or rules from the manufacturers, genius. That obviously does not mean the reviewing party does not use its brain to compare and test in a sensible way. You absolute clown.Kutark - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
They're not demands, they're just telling people ahead of time if there is a particular game that is exhibiting issues with a particular setting. Which especially if its an in progress issue they're debugging, doesn't paint a good picture of the product, and only serves to give ammunition for detractors to cherry pick data points to use in their crusades.