The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
GRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
There’s little to say about GRID 2 other than that we continue to get amazing performance out of the game even though it’s still one of the best looking games in our benchmark suite. For what it is worth the 295X2 holds a distinct advantage over the GTX 780 Ti SLI at both resolutions we test – especially at 2160p – but even the relatively slow GTX 780 Ti SLI is delivering better than 120fps at 1440p and better than 60fps at 2160p, so the difference is somewhat academic (ed: 120Hz 4K monitors, anyone?)
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mpdugas - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Time for two power supplies in this kind of build...rikm - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
huh?, no giveaway? why do I read this stuff?ok, seriously, love these reviews, but the thing I never understand is when they say Titan is better, but the charts seem to say the opposite, at least for compute.
lanskywalker - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
That card is a sexy beast.jimjamjamie - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Great effort from AMD, I wish they would focus on efficiency though - I feel with the changing computing climate and the shift to mobile that power-hungry components should be niche, not the norm.Basically, a dual-750ti card would be lovely :)
IUU - Saturday, April 12, 2014 - link
The sad thing about all this, is that the lowest resolution for these cards is considered to be the 2560x1440 one(for those who understand).Bigger disappointment yet, that after so many years of high expectations, the gpu still stands as a huge piece of silicon inside the pc that's firmly chained by the IT industry to serve gamers only.
Whatever the reason for no such consumer applications,thiis is a crime, mildly put.
RoboJ1M - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
The 4870 stories that were written here by Anand were my most memorable and favourite.That and the SSD saga.
Everybody loves a good Giant Killer story.
But the "Small Die Strategy" has long since ended?
When did that end?
Why did that end? I mean, it worked so well, didn't it?
patrickjp93 - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
People should be warned: the performance of this card is nowhere close to what the benchmarks or limited tests suggest. Even on the newest Asrock Motherboard the PCI v3 lanes bottleneck this about 40%. If you're just going to sequentially transform the same data once it's on the card, yes, you have this performance, which is impressive for the base cost, though entirely lousy for the Flop/Watt. But, if you're going to attempt to be moving 8GB of data to and from the CPU and GPU continuously, this card performs marginally better than the 290. The busses are bridge chips are going to need to get much faster for these cards to be really useful for anything outside purely graphical applications in the future. It's pretty much a waste for GPGPU computing.patrickjp93 - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
*The busses AND bridge chips...* Seriously what chat forum doesn't let you edit your comments?Gizmosis350k - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
I wonder if Quad CF works with theseBlitzninjasensei - Saturday, July 12, 2014 - link
I'm trying to imagine what kind of person would have 4 of these and why, maybe EyeFinity with 4k? Even then your CPU would bottleneck way before that, you would need some kind of motherboard with dual CPU slots and a game that can take advantage of it.