The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Not unlike Crysis 3, this is another game where the R9 Nano is on guard against NVIDIA thanks to the sub-Fury performance. Overall performance is still plenty, cracking 90fps at 2560x1440, but none the less it trails the power-similar GTX 980. The upside for AMD here is that for the size-similar GTX 970 Mini, the R9 Nano is still easily in the lead.
As for minimums, not unlike Shadow of Mordor, the R9 Nano is in a tough spot. Even with the advantage of Mantle, it always delivers slightly lower minimums than the GTX 980.
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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