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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gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Everything you say here is refuted by my previous comment.slickr - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
LOL. Either you are one of the biggest dumbasses out there or a shill yourself. To believe it was a "honest mistake" is like believing the earth is made out of cheese.They had at least 2 months to fix it and to rectify it, did they not read any of the hundred of reviews? They tried to cover it up and it was only when average CONSUMERS started noticing it and testing it that it was found out it had been a major fraud.
gw74 - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
insulting me, setting up a false dichotomy and a false analogy will not help you.They did not realise there had been an error during those 2 months, and none of the reviews mentioned it, because it does not noticeably affect performance except in certain SLI / 4K low framerate edge cases. It was only when until users starting reporting it in mid Jan. They had meetings between marketing and engineering then released a statement to PCPer on 24th Jan.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
Nvidia continued to lie to the public on its website by stating that the 970 has 224 GB/s, long after Anandtech's Correcting the Specs article was published — which made it clear enough that the card can't reach that number. Quit shilling.Alexvrb - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
Err, uh, the engineers only communicate in binary! The translator was sick that week! Locusts! It wasn't their fault!!Reality: "Well technically it has 4GB on there so we'll just... leave that detail out... they won't notice for months anyway. Then we'll apologize and a bunch of fanboys will defend us till the bitter end anyway."
If AMD had pulled a stunt like that they would have been raked through the coals till there were only ashes.
gw74 - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
no. that is not "reality". That is speculation.bigboxes - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Utter nonsense. Nvidia knew damn well that they had a technical and marketing issue and lied through their teeth. Misleading reviewers, customers and the general tech community. It eventually came out and they went into full damage control. And before you say it, I bought an MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G card after all this went down. I'm happy with this card, but it is what it is.gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
you forgot to include evidence of them lying, or a reason for why they would lie.Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It's called reality, dude.gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
meaningless