The AMD Radeon R9 290 Review
by Ryan Smith on November 5, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
Battlefield 3
Our major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
With Battlefield 3 generally favoring NVIDIA GPUs the 290X fell just short of the GTX 780, and consequently the 290 will fall back a bit further. As such the 290 trails the GTX 780 by 7% while trailing the 290X by a narrower 5%. Furthermore in this case the 290 just hits the cutoff for a 60fps average at 2560, which means the card should have no problem sustaining minimum framerates above 30fps in even the most hectic firefights.
Elsewhere the 290 doesn’t get to enjoy quite the massive performance advantages over the 280X and GTX 770 that it enjoyed earlier, but it’s still ahead of its cheaper competitors. Against the 280X the 290 is 23% faster, while against the GTX 770 it’s a narrower 12%.
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jljaynes - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
i said "good headphones" - I don't need to turn the sound way up to drown out my case fans - foam cups around my ears do that quite welltechkitsune - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Most serious gamers are likely to be using cans with some form of sound isolation or cancelling. Even my crummy $10 Sentry cans can cut about -10dBA off, which is surprisingly good for semi-open backed headphones.Homeles - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
"That, and any self respecting gamer uses a good set of headphones"Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that.
Ranger101 - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Ryan we didn't realise you were such an Nvidia fan boy, thanks for clarifying.dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
I'm kind of surprised there haven't been more AMD fanboys in here accusing Anandtech and Ryan of bias and being bought out by Nvidia. What's going on? I can usually tell the time by you guys. I feel sort of insecure now, you guys are shaking my faith in your profound and reliable idiocy.HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
The AMD fanboys know that there was no way of disguising this launch as anything but a complete miscalculation on AMD's part. If they'd done anything less than what they did, well, they'd have seemed AMD biased. This is their cover. The more important ad dollars purchase will be a positive review of Kaveri, which should be coming up soon-ish.Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
That's some twisted logic, HDO. Even for you.Homeles - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
That's interesting to say, in light of the very obvious free advertising grabbed by AMD employees who have jumped the gun when the NDA dropped and have grabbed the first comment on a pretty big handful of AMD product launches.Homeles - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
On AnandTech, that is.boot318 - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
The reference cooler is the only downer about this card. Anyways, I think every reasonable human being was expecting this to be $450.... so great job AMD!BTW, Anandtech, I'll take the heat & noise for that performance & price. Another great review by you guys. I respect you guys for giving us you honest opinion during this review. Best on the net ;)