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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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.