The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Like the other Fiji cards, AMD is promoting the R9 Nano in part on its 4K capabilities. And while we disagree that this card is suitable for 4K gaming based on its sub-Fury performance, we’re including 4K results anyhow to serve as a point of comparison.
In any case Battlefield 4 is often a good indicator of general card performance, and for the R9 Nano this is no exception. What we find is that the R9 Nano trails the other Fury cards in all cases. However to our initial surprise, the R9 Nano sticks rather close to the R9 Fury. The petite powerhouse trails the R9 Fury by only 1-6%, which for the record is a smaller gap than we were expecting.
While the R9 Nano packs a full Fiji GPU, AMD has to pull back on clockspeeds to hit their power targets; in the case of Battlefield 4 this is an average clockspeed of just 879MHz at 2560x1440. Given this we had been expecting the R9 Nano to deliver around 85-90% of the performance of the R9 Fury (and about 80% of the R9 Fury X), based on the assumption that average clockspeeds would be closer to 800MHz. So the fact that the R9 Nano starts off as close to the R9 Fury as it does – even if it’s still trailing it – is a pleasant surprise.
Otherwise with performance still clearly occupying a position as a “3rd tier” Fiji card, I’m not sure if anything about these results should be surprising. On a price/performance basis AMD is not intending to be competitive with other $650 cards, so the R9 Fury X and GTX 980 Ti are of course on the top of the heap. What you get instead is a card that delivers around 90% of R9 Fury X’s performance in BF4 with much less power consumption.
Moving on, compared to the lower power and smaller cards, the R9 Nano is as expected a clean sweep. Demonstrating the virtues of a wide and lower clocked processor’s ability to deliver strong performance without requiring extreme power, everything from the R9 285 to the GTX 980 trails the R9 Nano here. Compared to the GTX 970 Mini in particular, the R9 Nano is 12-26% faster depending on the resolution.
The one potential problem here for the R9 Nano is the GTX 980. Though not a Mini-ITX card, the GTX 980’s power consumption is going to be fairly close to the R9 Nano’s, definitely more so than GTX 970’s. From a power efficiency standpoint it’s the GTX 980 that poses the greatest challenge to the R9 Nano, and while it’s ahead of the GTX 980 in this case at 2560x1440 and higher, it’s a sign that AMD should be worried about what could happen if an NVIDIA partner produced a Mini-ITX GTX 980.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
284 Comments
View All Comments
Jm09 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Yes I'm aware, but the nano is binned for the highest quality chips. I wish they would of released two models where one was clocked lower and didn't have binned chips. That alone increased the price of this chipMaddyScientist - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
It would be nice to use the latest version of LuxMark 3.1, as this has optimizations for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, that makes it run faster on more recent GPUs. This would would give a better picture of the compute benefits of these new GPUS.at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Ryan, i realise it's a test bench, but that cable management is making me twitchy :)Ryan Smith - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Noted and agreed. It wasn't really built for public display, it was thrown together for video recording. Small computers are nice, but they're hard to quickly route cables in, especially with my giant hands.awstar - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Review > Compute > Vegas: The Vegas benchmark has peaked. The reviewers should post stats on timeline playback performance, or upgrade the test file to 4K XAVC 32-bit float project levels. This would show a much greater difference between the modern GPUs.Haravikk - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It's great to see a card like this; finally a proper high end for half-length cards. While there are some good Mini-ITX cases that can take full-length cases, they end up so long that it kind of defeats the point of building small, but half-length cards are usually more in the budget to mid-range bracket, or a generation behind, either way it means a big sacrifice in going small.Hopefully we'll see more competition in this case, as I'm one of those who, in going small, is fine with paying a premium to still remain fairly competitive while doing so.
Regarding the idle noise level though; I still find it weird that there isn't better support out there for switching from integrated to discrete GPUs. Since most people still favour Intel processors this would make a lot of sense given that they have integrated graphics, plus in the Mini-ITX size on the AMD side it can be more cost effective to get an APU anyway. If the integrated GPU could take over for desktop stuff, browsing etc. like we see on laptops, then it would leave the Nano to just function as a set of video interfaces, which would be much better.
Alternatively, I wonder if they could even just add an APU type GPU as a low-power alternative onto the card; i.e- with a light load and low VRAM requirements it would take over and just use some low cost RAM (or even system RAM) so that the rest of the card can be shut off entirely.
Peichen - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Modern graphic card only draws single-digit watt power at idle/2D so the whole hybrid GPU idea was dropped. Routing video through integrated GPU also reduce performance by 2-3% and taken into account the complexity involved with driver just to save 8w makes no sense.atomsymbol - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
R9 Nano: 4096 SP, 1 GHz, 512 GB/s => x+5 FPS, price y+$220R9 390X: 2816 SP, 1.05 GHz, 384 GB/s => x FPS, price y
+35% computational power => +5 FPS
Mathos - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
After having read this review. All I can really think of to say about the Nano, is they should of priced it at least the same as the regular R9 Fury. That way you'd easily get GTX 980 performance in a itx form factor, for close to the same price. I must say your review seems a bit more fair than Toms hardware. Somehow they had a regular 980 outperforming the FuryX, so I was like wth Toms.I personally had been waiting for the Nano reviews to come out, before deciding what to get. But going by the price, it looks like I'll be getting an R9 Fury, so I can run most games in VSR 1440p, scaled down to 1080p. Either that or I'll just cap my fps at 65 and save power. Should do well once more DX12 games come out too.
itproflorida - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
you have no idea what your talking about its all speculation. thank you