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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SirRaulo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Game changer!A faster card and $100 cheaper... even an nvidia fanboy would know the difference.... wait, a fanboy wouldnt... too bad.
willis936 - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
The game has changed twice a year for the past 20 years. If the change isn't changing one could argue that the game is staying the same.apaceeee - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Er...I don't think so ..polaco - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
I have seen you used AMD Catalyst 13.11 (Beta 5) in the 290X benchmarks. Maybe would be nice if you can post some with the updated revision as they say to improve performance from 8% to 30% in several games.http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/lat...
Thanks!
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Those are versus Catalyst 13.9. There are no performance improvements in our game set between 13.11 v5 and v6.polaco - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Oh, ok if you say so. I got confused coz in one place it states that explicitly and in the other does not."Performance improvements for the AMD APU Series (comparing AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 to AMD Catalyst 13.9)" in the other place doesn't make that clarification just
"Performance improvements"
wiyosaya - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Personally, I think it would have been interesting to see a GTX 580 thrown in for the compute benchmarks.rogerthat1945 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
The ASUS GTX 780 went up in price $120+ USD for me last night when I was expecting a price drop thids morning.Last week (and all last month at least, the ASUS GTX 780 price was around $745 USD (in Yen) on Amazon Jp.
I put one in my shoping basket, and browsed some more for extra items (Zx Evo Headset considerations), and then heard about the NVidia cards price to be dropped for the GTX 780 range; so I held off going to checkout; however, this morning when I went to look at paying via the advertised price drop, BUT I found that Amazon have JACKED-UP the price to $867 US. :no:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/ASUSTeK-GTX780%E3%83%81%E3...
Question is;-
"Where can I buy this card for a `proper` price (which popular site) where they will POST it via Air Mail to Japan (not a US military address)? :ange:
Every site I tried from California to China do not post to Japan.
Amazon Japan, you are Kraaayyy-Zee crayon users. :pt1cable:
photek242 - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
Now i have a GTX 680 sli setup i think to sell the 2 cards and buy a AMD R290xOr stay with the sli setup?
Here in belgium the r290x goes between 465 - 550 euro
Tia
muziqaz - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
Ryan, I don't know if you are still reading this or not, but regarding Vegas Pro, I suppose other codecs do not use GPUs as expected. I use mp4 format and even though sony and AMD are telling me that GPUs do accelerate that format it actually do not. I can't even get my 12 thread CPU to be loaded fully. Or maybe there is another codec which is supported by youtube which might get some GPU acceleration if enabled? maybe someone else can pitch in with suggestions? :)