The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds the “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.
As with Battlefield 4, the R9 Nano solidly secures its place relative to the Fury lineup, delivering 90-95% of the performance of the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury respectively. This pushes the card’s performance below 60fps even at 3840x2160 low quality, but it’s more than enough for 2560x1440.
However once we do reach 2560, we find that the R9 Nano is now tied with the GTX 980 at just over 65fps. As we mentioned on the last page the GTX 980 is the biggest threat to the R9 Nano from an efficiency standpoint, and this is why. Limiting our scope to just mini cards however finds the R9 Nano comfortably ahead of the GTX 970 Mini.
Meanwhile Crysis 3 is a great example of why AMD is poking at themselves by comparing the R9 Nano to the GTX 290X. The card is little more than half the length of AMD’s former flagship and yet delivers 22% better performance while drawing much less power (more on that later). In doing so AMD is clearly picking a low point to make their gains look better, but at the same time it shows that yes, AMD can in fact improve over R9 290X on performance, power, and noise all at the same time.
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wperry - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Man, going by the comments, there's piss in many a bowls of Cheerios this morning.DanNeely - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
For anyone who doesn't know what's going on, HardOCP put out a good writeup yesterday.http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/09/amd_roy_...
TLDR version: A senior AMD manager said some really stupid stuff on twitter.
palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Shocker, Kyle at HardOCP is butthurt....pt2501 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
After reading the commentary at HardOCP, I generally agree with the senior AMD manager. Nothing he said insinuated that HardOCP was an unfair site, what was said is that HardOCPs focus is for top performance especially overclocking performance. Fury Nano designed to fill a niche for a small but high performance build. We all know the ongoing supply issues exist with Fiji and if you have limited supply you must choose where cards go that produce no income or customer satisfaction or else it will be ANOTHER PAPER launch. The reviewer began his argument by bitching about paper launches on the first page when this limited sample reviews might be designed to mitigate this situation.He complains about AMD only wanting things painted in a favorable light but he illustrates that his is willing to remove content that he finds unfavorable when THE REVIEWER THEN REMOVED A FORUM POST OF A CUSTOM FURY NANO BECAUSE IT WAS NOT IN LINE WITH THE SITE'S FOCUS. Bottom line when this guy even admits he is an asshole. I just cannot accept people taking this reviewer and by extension HardOCPs butthurt attitude about being excluded. The AMD manager didn't even mention HardOCP, his posts where in response to other sites. HardOCP just assumed that this extended to them.
As a reference Anandtech has never been an enthusiastic fan of AMDs' cards since the 9700 pro. Yet AMD and Nvidia have NEVER failed to give them a card to review. Doesn't this seem to speak more about the authenticity and reputation of the review site? While I am wary of venders choosing who gets cards to review, with a product as difficult as the Fiji cards to keep up with demand I more than understand their desire to get cards into people computers. AMD knows these are niche cards but at least they want these cards to get make them money, which AMD needs.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
That site is so amateurish. They didn't even include a single objective noise measurement in power supply reviews.lmcd - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
I didn't realize HardOCP was more than a forum...at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
lmfao @ Kyle. his tears are practically soaking my screen.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Thanks for the great review. I think the benchmarks ultimately end up underscoring how much graphics power it currently takes to run games at 4k and certainly argues the case for lower resolutions when it comes to single-GPU situations. Even though the Nano is a much less wattage-absurd GPU, I personally think 175 watts is just too much to be reasonable. I like having warm feet in the winter, but when the CPU is happy with 65 watts, pairing up a graphics card with it that needs almost 3x that much power is frustratingly annoying.Communism - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Take a Fury X, remove some VRMs, remove the closed loop water cooler, set Powertune to -50%, lower voltages a bit.Then sell at the same goddamned price as Fury X with a horrible open air cooler that would be a bad idea in any case that wouldn't be able to fit a Fury X to start with.
Fanboy milking at it's finest.
Asomething - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I partially agree with this, they should have dropped the price, though you are hating on the cooler a bit too much. its keeping in line with the 970 mini's cooler for noise/temps while cooling a hotter card, the cooler exhausts half out the case and half into the the case which is a hell of alot better than the 970 mini which exhausts in all directions (which is about 75% in the case and the rest out the back).