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
Crysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013/2014, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 5 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA, never mind 2560 and beyond.
Unlike games such as Battlefield 3, AMD’s GCN cards have always excelled on Crysis: Warhead, and as a result it’s a good game for the 290 right off the bat. Furthermore because the 290X throttles so much here, coupled with this game’s love of ROP performance, the 290 actually beats the 290X, if only marginally so. .5fps is within our experimental variation (even though this benchmark is looped multiple times), but it just goes to show how close the 290 and 290X can be, and furthermore how powerful the higher average clockspeeds can be in ROP or geometry bound scenarios. Graphics rendering may be embarrassingly parallel in general, but sometimes a bit narrower and a bit higher clocked can be the path to better performance.
Meanwhile because the 290 does so well here, it makes for another sizable victory over the GTX 780, beating it by 16%. Further down the line the GTX 770 is beaten by 46%, and the 280X by 27%.
Moving on to our minimum framerates, the 290 actually extends its lead over the 290X. Now minimum framerates aren’t as reliable as average framerates, even in Crysis, so our experimental variation is going to be higher here, but it does once again show the advantages the 290 enjoys being clocked higher than the 290X under a sustained workload. Though on the other hand the GTX 780 catches up slightly, closing the gap to 10%.
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dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Fanboism? I know right?EJS1980 - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
He was referring to you, and you know this.Mondozai - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
EJS1980 the buttboy for Nvidia has spoken!JDG1980 - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Well, what the review fails to take into account is that for the vast majority of the card's lifetime, all or nearly all the cards actually sold will be using third-party coolers which are much better than AMD's halfhearted effort. All the noise measurements are completely irrelevant once Asus and MSI get their hands on the silicon and start releasing custom cards.A5 - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
They can't review a card they don't have. I would think they will do a 290 round-up once some of the custom designs come out.Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Quite right. This is a perfectly fair review.dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
And then there's the disturbing revelation on Tom's that retail cards are underperforming AMD's reference review cards by a significant margin. But it's AMD, so it's okay.I mean seriously, could you imagine the uncontrollable outrage there would be if Nvidia tried to pull something like this? There would be an uproar from the community unlike anything the interweb's seen before. But if it's AMD? Largely silence, driven by either indifference (AMD fanboys), or AMD fanboy appeasement (confrontation averse reviewers). We wouldn't want to directly oppose the AMD fanboy agenda, lest we have to deal with yet another uproar from AMD's zealous fan-base, which occurs whenever a reviewer says anything remotely negative yet entirely relevant about an AMD product (Bulldozer, HD6990, R9 290, etc...)
just4U - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - link
I've been watching this battle since the Radeon 8500 Geforce 3 days.. and to be absolutely honest with you.. don't matter what amd or Nvidia does fanboys will rage against the rival. It's the way they are... (shrug)Both companies have had their fair share of tricks btw.. (just in case you didn't know that or had forgotten)
dragonsqrrl - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Uh, definitely haven't forgotten, otherwise there would be no context for the vastly different reactions I'm referring to. And honestly dude, I think you and other people who refer to the fanboy situation on both sides being the same are just displaying your own ignorance and unfamiliarity with the situation. I've noticed that despite how bad it can get here, I've never seen it get even remotely close to the norm on Tom's. It's gotten so bad at times (Bulldozer, HD6990, recent buyers guides, etc...) that the authors and reviewers have had to address the AMD fanboy situation directly in forums and comments. To which the zealous AMD fanbase becomes even more enraged, even resorting to malicious personal attacks against Chris, Don, etc, demanding to know why Nvidia/Intel fanboys are never addressed directly in the same way. Well, because they don't behave the same way... lol.When you genuinely believe that any author who doesn't conform to your inherently biased agenda is biased and bought out, and you adamantly defend that belief (over and over again) with childish and at times downright offensive remarks directed at both the authors and other readers, then it's not something that can be ignored. It never ceases to amaze me that despite how often they're thoroughly shutdown, and lose practically every argument they start, they still press on. They just ignore and continue. In fact if anything it seems to give them strength and further cement their delusional beliefs. They're an endless source of astonishment, those AMD fanboys, I'll give them that much.
Homeles - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
From everything I've read, reference cards sell a lot more often than you'd think.