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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kallogan - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
buy an asus directcu gtx 970 mini-itx, oc it a bit, same perf same power consumption for half the price :)Asomething - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
and thats only gonna work at 1080p, even funnier is that you think the 970 dcu mini cooler is adequate for an oc, its running at 74c at its boost speed (not an oc). you wont get much more out of it compared to a full sized 970 (you might get another 100-150mhz at best before you start hitting some limits as kitguru found) which wont get you close enough to the nano's performance above 1080p.Peichen - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Any GTX970 can go up to 1450Mhz boosted if not 1500Mhz from 1178Mhz stock boost. That's more than an 20% overclock and as voltage cannot be changed on Nvidia cards, heat will only go up linearly not exponentially.Gigaplex - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
The cooler on the mini isn't sufficient to support such a large overclock without sounding like a leaf blower.medi03 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Same perf?Nano is 5% faster than 980, it wipes the floor with 970.
Jeez.
mobutu - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
As much as I want AMD to succed in both CPU and GPU fields, I'm afraid this R9 Nano is not good enough.All it takes is a mini980 from nvidia/partners priced at lets say 550 (because of the better cooling solution) and R9 Nano is busted.
Eh, maybe next year with 16-20nm tech and hbm2 ...
HollyDOL - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I'd say it's a case of technology lacking behind architecture. To me Nano seems to simply struggle on generating too much heat for it's capacity to get rid of it... Thus limited frequency and lower performance. It was already visible with water cooled Fury X, but it hurts much more in this small form factor. So for me it's more proof of concept than actually elite class card.T1beriu - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Did you read the review?! It's not about heat. It's about limited power consumption.Gigaplex - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Limited power consumption... to keep the heat output in check. Simple thermodynamics.tipoo - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
That rear resistor layout. Nice detail, AMD.http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9621/RearFull.jpg