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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
284 Comments
View All Comments
gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Everything you say here is refuted by my previous comment.slickr - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
LOL. Either you are one of the biggest dumbasses out there or a shill yourself. To believe it was a "honest mistake" is like believing the earth is made out of cheese.They had at least 2 months to fix it and to rectify it, did they not read any of the hundred of reviews? They tried to cover it up and it was only when average CONSUMERS started noticing it and testing it that it was found out it had been a major fraud.
gw74 - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
insulting me, setting up a false dichotomy and a false analogy will not help you.They did not realise there had been an error during those 2 months, and none of the reviews mentioned it, because it does not noticeably affect performance except in certain SLI / 4K low framerate edge cases. It was only when until users starting reporting it in mid Jan. They had meetings between marketing and engineering then released a statement to PCPer on 24th Jan.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
Nvidia continued to lie to the public on its website by stating that the 970 has 224 GB/s, long after Anandtech's Correcting the Specs article was published — which made it clear enough that the card can't reach that number. Quit shilling.Alexvrb - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
Err, uh, the engineers only communicate in binary! The translator was sick that week! Locusts! It wasn't their fault!!Reality: "Well technically it has 4GB on there so we'll just... leave that detail out... they won't notice for months anyway. Then we'll apologize and a bunch of fanboys will defend us till the bitter end anyway."
If AMD had pulled a stunt like that they would have been raked through the coals till there were only ashes.
gw74 - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
no. that is not "reality". That is speculation.bigboxes - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Utter nonsense. Nvidia knew damn well that they had a technical and marketing issue and lied through their teeth. Misleading reviewers, customers and the general tech community. It eventually came out and they went into full damage control. And before you say it, I bought an MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G card after all this went down. I'm happy with this card, but it is what it is.gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
you forgot to include evidence of them lying, or a reason for why they would lie.Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
It's called reality, dude.gw74 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
meaningless