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?)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
131 Comments
View All Comments
Dupl3xxx - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
$2k+ for a 4k screen? where are you wasing your money? In norway, you can get a 4k screen for just about 5kNOK, or just about 850USD, including tax! also, why would you need a $1500 CPU, whene the 4930k is 200MHz slower, for half the price?Also, WHY would you want 32GB of 2400MHz ram!?!?!?! There is next to no improvement over 1600MHz!
As far as SSD's goes, a single samsung 250/500GB should be plenty, you got 32GB of ram to use as buffer!
And if you want a "tight" system with insane preformance, the 295x2 is the best choice ATM. Double the 290x preformance, "half" the size.
lehtv - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Another difference is the way this card handles heat compared to any 290X CF setup apart from custom water cooling. The CLLC combines the benefits of reference GPUs - the ability to exhaust hot air externally rather than into the case - with the benefits of third party cooling - the ability to keep temperatures and noise levels lower than those of reference blower cards. A 290X crossfire setup using reference cooling is not even worth considering for anyone who cares about noise output, while third party 290X crossfire is restricted to cases with enough cooling capacity to handle the heat.Supersonic494 - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
You are right, but keep in mind on big limitation with normal crossfire/SLI is the space taken up by 2 big dual slot GPUs, with this it is only one slot; however other than that you might as well get 2 290x'sbj_murphy - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Dual GPU doesn't have the requirement for 2 PCI-E slots; you can't do SLI/Crossfire in a Mini-ITX system for example.HalloweenJack - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
muppet - 20w more in furmark , and 160 in games - not hundreds more. keep drinking the ananadtech koolaid.WaltC - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Interesting. [H] seems to have done some pretty thorough testing, and the AMD card blows by 780Ti SLI in every single case. Of course, [H] is testing @ 4k resolutions/3-way Eyefinity exclusively--but that's where anyone who shells out this kind of money is going to be. 1080P? Don't make me laugh...;)WaltC - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Can't edit, so I'll just say I don't know where "1080P" came from...;)lwooood - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Apologies for going slightly OT. Is there any indication when AMD fills in the middle of their product stack with GCN 1.1 parts?sascha - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
I like to know that, too!MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
I would say that indication is 20 nm chips, at the end of the year the earliest.