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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Qwertilot - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Also Intel's 35w quad cores seem to be getting rather fast nowadays, so overall system power/a very quiet CPU cooler is much easier to handle. Not many really tiny cases mind.Also maybe a question of if you want to go one fan for something with this much power draw - it can be tamed to very, very quiet by 2 fan designs.
mosu - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I wonder how Nvidia will manage HBM2 with no previous experience with HBM. Maybe TSMC will borrow some for them...nathanddrews - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Probably just fine seeing as they have been designing Pascal for a few years and they just began sampling a few months ago, meaning they likely have working chips in their labs right now. AMD managed fine with their first implementation. Intel seems to be doing well with their version of stacked memory. Samsung and Toshiba are also doing fine. No one would be bringing it to the consumer market if they didn't already have a good handle on it.Michael Bay - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I will be an asshole and remind everybody that there is _still_ no 960 review.MrSpadge - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
What exactly would you expect from an AT review now that can not already be found elsewhere? I know they said a review would be coming, but seriously.. let them focus on important topics.bill.rookard - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
You are absolutely right. On both points.Mikemk - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Really?extide - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
They SAID that there will not be a 960 review.Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Because the 960 was a poor product that made Nvidia look bad?D. Lister - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
No, because AT was understaffed and they kept delaying it, until they realised that they were so late (compared to other sites) that the meager hits their review would get, wouldn't be worth the effort that they would have to put in.As for your inability to find a review, allow me to assist:
https://www.google.com/search?q=960+review&rlz...