The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect that current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
Both of AMD’s Fury cards have handled Shadow of Mordor well in the past, and R9 Nano is no exception. The R9 Nano ends up trailing the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury by around 13% and 7% respectively, not too far off from their respective overall averages. Otherwise compared to NVIDIA’s offerings the R9 Nano clearly trails the similarly priced GTX 980 Ti, but enjoys a very comfortable margin over the likes of the GTX 980 and GTX 970 Mini.
Minimum framerates on the other hand also inherit the other Fiji cards’ weaknesses. AMD actually doesn’t fare too poorly here, however the toll of being slower than the R9 Fury doesn’t do the R9 Nano any favors. Below 3840x2160 the R9 Nano feels the pinch of the GTX 980 and GTX 970 Mini, falling behind these cards.
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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