The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Since R9 Nano is a fully enabled (albeit lower clocked) Fiji part, synthetic performance behaviors should be very close to R9 Fury X after accounting for the clockspeed differences.
Since the R9 Fury still features a fully enabled geometry frontend, this test is all about clockspeeds. And that means the R9 Nano takes a fairly typical dive here, trailing the R9 Fury X by a bit over 10%, while trailing the R9 Fury by a bit more than we see in games.
Somewhat surprisingly, the R9 Nano doesn’t do better than what we see here for the texel fillrate test. It still needs to make up for a lack of clockspeed, but it does have more texture units than the R9 Fury since it’s a fully enabled GPU. On the other hand pixel throughput is a bit better than what we were expecting; R9 Nano doesn’t seem too inconvenienced by its clockspeed disadvantage.
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looncraz - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Indeed. At $200 cheaper I'd consider buying two of them, rather than none.The lack of a DL-DVI port, though, would probably limit me to just one.
Alexvrb - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
Agreed I think it's a great compact card but for their sake I hope they drop the price gradually as yields improve. Personally I will be waiting to see what happens with HBM2, I'm hoping that with the improvements in density they'll be able to push it into mid-range cards as well next time.Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I didn't see much about DX 12 and how it should counter all the energy efficiency stuff that is being pretty much obsessed about. The conclusion, for instance, talks so much about energy efficiency when in fact the real point of this card is not performance per watt but the form factor.I don't see anything about Ashes — not even a word about why it wasn't included.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
"I don't see anything about Ashes — not even a word about why it wasn't included."We don't include non-release software in our GPU evaluations. Ashes isn't a complete game, it's still an alpha.
AS118 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I feel like that's totally valid. Until multiple finalized DX12 benches come out, I don't feel that we can really understand how current cards will work with DX12.Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It still merits a mention, even if it's just to say that.AS118 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I agree. In fact, this review seems as honest as every other Nano one. They all say "it's niche" and "it's too expensive for the performance if you don't need the small size, and regardless of what Roy said, the sites that were given a card are quite critical of the Nano, and most recommend getting a bigger, faster, cheaper card instead if you don't need something tiny.They say "It's a great product, but only for people that really must have the strongest mini-card".
RussianSensation - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Wreckage = trolls like Rollo, but minus the facts.Kutark - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Whats the Roy Taylor incident? Im not aware.at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
If there's anyone championing the cause of objectivity, it's you