The AMD Radeon R9 290X Review
by Ryan Smith on October 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
Crysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
Much like Battlefield 3, at 2560 it’s a neck and neck race between the 290X and the GTX 780. At 52fps neither card stands apart, and in traditional Crysis fashion neither card is fast enough to pull off 60fps here – never mind the fact that we’re not even at the highest quality levels.
Meanwhile if we bump up the resolution to 4K, things get ugly, both in the literal and figurative senses. Even at the game’s lowest quality settings neither card can get out of the 40s, though as usual the 290X pulls ahead in performance at this resolution.
As such, for 60fps+ on Crysis 3 we’ll have to resort to AFR, which gives us some interesting results depending on which resolution we’re looking at. For 2560 it’s actually the GTX 780 SLI that pulls ahead, beating the 290X in scaling. However at 4K it’s the 290X CF that pulls ahead, enjoying a 53% scaling factor to the GTX 780’s 40%. Interestingly both cards see a reduction in scaling factors here versus 2560, despite the fact that both cards are having no problem reaching full utilization. Something about Crysis 3, most likely the sheer workload the game throws out at our GPUs, is really bogging things down at 4K. Though to AMD’s credit despite the poorer scaling factor at 4K the 290X CF in uber mode is just fast enough to hit 60fps at Medium quality, and not a frame more.
Moving on to our look at delta percentages, all of our AFR setups are acceptable here, but nothing is doing well. 20-21% variance is the order of the day, a far cry from the 1-2% variance of single card setups. This is one of those games where both vendors need to do their homework, as we’re going to be seeing a lot more of CryEngine 3 over the coming years.
As for 4K, things are no better but at least they’re no worse.
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Pontius - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Some good points Jian, I would like to see side by side comparisons as well. However, I've seen some studies that implement the same algorithm in both OpenCL and CUDA and the results are mostly the same if properly implemented. I've been doing GPU computing development in my spare time over the last year and OpenCL does have one advantage over CUDA that is the reason I use it: run-time compilation. If at run-time you are working with various data sets that involve checking many conditionals, you can compile a kernel with the conditionals stripped out and get a good performance increase since GPUs aren't good at conditionals like CPUs are. But in the end, I agree, more apples to apples comparisons are needed.azixtgo - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
the titan is irrelevant. I can't figure why the hell people think a $1000 GPU is even worth mentioning. It's not for sane people to buy and definitely not a genuine effort by nvidia. They saw an opportunity and went for itBloodcalibur - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
It's $350 more because of it's compute performance ugh. It benchmarks 5-6x more than the 780 on DGEMM. This is why the card is priced a whopping $350 more than their own 780 which is only a few FPS lower on most games and setups. The only people that should've bought a Titan were people who both GAME and do a little bit of computing.To compare it to the 290x are what retarded ignorant people are doing. Compare it to the 780 which it does beat out. Now we have to wait for nvidia's response.
Cellar Door - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Read the review before trolling. It's $549azixtgo - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
technically it's a good value. I think. I despise the higher prices as well but who really knows the value of the product. Comparing a GPU to a lot of things (like a ps4 that has a million other components or a complete PC ), maybe not. but comparing this to nvidia... well...Pounds - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Did the nvidia fanboy get his feelings hurt?superflex - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Yes, and his wallet got shredded.Validation is a bitch.
piroroadkill - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Huh? You can go over to Newegg right now and buy one for $580.Wreckage - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
He did not say "Mantle" 7 times so he might not be from their PR department.Either way the 290 is hot, loud, power hungry and nothing new in the performance department. It's cheap but that won't last. Looks like we will have to wait form Maxwell for something truly new.
chrnochime - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
You OTOH look like you can't RTFA.