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
Total War: Rome 2
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.
With Rome 2 no one is getting 60fps at 2560, but then again as a strategy game it’s hardly necessary. In which case the 290X once again beats the GTX 780 by a smaller than average 6%, essentially sitting in the middle of the gap between the GTX 780 and GTX Titan.
Meanwhile at 4K we can actually get some relatively strong results out of even our single card configurations, but we have to drop our settings down by 2 notches to Very High to do so. Though like all of our 4K game tests, it turns out well for AMD, with the 290X’s lead growing to 13%.
AFR performance is a completely different matter though. It’s not unusual for strategy games to scale poorly or not at all, but Rome 2 is different yet. The GTX 780 SLI consistently doesn’t scale at all, however with the 290X CF we see anything from massive negative scaling at 2560 to a small performance gain at 4K. Given the nature of the game we weren’t expecting anything here at all, and though getting any scaling is a nice turn of events to have negative scaling like this is a bit embarrassing for AMD. At least NVIDIA can claim to be more consistent here.
Without working AFR scaling, our deltas are limited to single-GPU configurations and as a result are unremarkable. Sub-3% for everyone, everywhere, which is a solid result for any single-GPU setup.
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xres625e - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
sterven..eddieveenstra - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
stoere jongen ben je.... bah.TrantaLocked - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Hm I wonder why I can find the 290X for $550 on newegg?Dal Makhani - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
lol AMD fanboy. This card is alright, nothing "uber". It brings some proper pricing sense back into the green team's head which is needed, the gtx 780 will be dropped to R9 290X pricing, and the 780 Ti will be Nvidia's new 650 dollar card. But to justify 100 dollar price difference, i dont know if 780 Ti can show big enough gains. That will be interesting to see next month.tuklap - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I doubt that nvidia gtx 780 will drop price on par with r9 290x..just4U - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I doubt it as well.. They didn't ever really drop prices on the 560Ti until it EOL..mfergus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Well it's uber in the sense that it brings much needed competition to Nvidia's very high priced high end cards. Nobody should of thought this card was going to be revolutionary though, it's on the same 28nm as all the other cards and it has the same architecture as the 7790 which had very minor compute changes compared to GCN 1.0dragonsqrrl - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
Dropping the 780 by $100 is the very least Nvidia would have to do to remain competitive, and personally I don't think that would be nearly enough. The 290X is performance competitive with Titan, and despite the fact that Titan is cooler, quieter, consumes less power, has a much better shroud, and superior DP performance, it should come down to the same price as the 290X to remain competitive due to the slightly higher performance of the 290X. A ~$550 Titan or ~$400 780 would be amazing.mfergus - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
I don't expect Titan's price to change much but I could be wrong. I never really thought of it as a standard gaming card, it's a total halo product with lots of memory and the only non Quadro/Tesla with full DP performance. The 780ti will be cheaper than Titan though and faster in gaming performance.Bloodcalibur - Thursday, October 24, 2013 - link
You truly are an idiot if you think that the Titan should be compared to a 290X and that the sentence ends there. The Titan itself only performs a small bit above nvidia's own 780, but the $350 price difference is there for it's compute performance. It's basically a budget workstation card with higher than 780 gaming abilities for those who game AND do a little bit of 3D computing. Derp.This retard actually suggested a gaming/workstation hybrid pried at $1000 should compete downwards with a $550 gaming card.