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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SolMiester - Monday, October 28, 2013 - link
There is no way Origin PC or any other OEM would want to put this reference card in there systems..I cant wait to see RMA stats with this card...AMD blew the card after such a great GPU...how many times will they do this?polaco - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
This is an interesting article too for gamers that are looking for 4K:http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-r9-290x-vs-...
dwade123 - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
All this shows is that GTX Titan is one efficient card. Better than both GTX 780 and AMD's offerings.ehpexs - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link
Looks like AMD is a gen away from offereding a crossfire solution that can max out my triple crossovers @ 7680x1440Th-z - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
It seems AMD is pushing 290X really hard, to the point beyond its efficiency curve to try to win over larger chips with almost 1B more transistors from Nvidia. I wonder if reducing some ROPs and dedicate more die area to shader core may look like to 290X, or to go all in, designing a chip as large as Nvidia's top parts.Ytterbium - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
I'm sad they've gone to 1/8th FP, the 280X is a better compute card!Animalosity - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Why can't people just accept that AMD has beaten Nvidia in every shape and form this time. Yeah, its always been back and forth. And it will again in the future, but for now AMD has the crown for everything except for power/sound levels. Keep in mind that not only does AMD own both next gen consoles, they are also running every one of these benchmarks on beta drivers which means that they will only continue to get better. Add mantle to the equation and Titan will have absolutely zero purpose in life. It was a good card. RIP Kepler.Vortac - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Well, let's point out again that Titan has a much better FP64 performance, approx. 2.5x better than 290X, so "absolutely zero purpose" is not entirely correct. Of course, if you don't care about computing, then obviously 290X is a much better choice now.Luke7 - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
Are you talking about this?http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/?d=qa&f=gpu_financ...
Vortac - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
In this interesting review Titan is pitted against 7970 which has 1/4 FP64 performance and is indeed very good for double precision calculations, especially with OpenCL. 290X has 1/8 FP64 and its double precision performance is worse than 7970, leaving Titan with some space to breathe.