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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ImSpartacus - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Good to see that Anandtech got a Nano.Wreckage - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I'm sure they agreed to give a "fair" review. I think everyone should wait for independent reviews after the whole Roy Taylor incident.HOOfan 1 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I bet AMD knew the numbers would be exactly the same at all the big name sites. It is the conclusions they were worried about.close - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Wreckage, you would say that of course after being "motivated" by no less then two 980 graphic cards as gifts just in the last 6 weeks. What kind of credibility do you expect after this?theduckofdeath - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
New review on a hardware review site, comment section full of bitching.Yeah, this is the tech news of 2015. Whining and trolling instead of discussing tech.
LoganPowell - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
It's too bad that the AMD Radeon r9 Nano does so bad among consumer based rankings (see http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-hard-dri... for example...)theNiZer - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Spot on mate! (sry for double posting)gw74 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
The R9 Nano was about to make me interested in AMD cards finally. On finding out about what they've been up to denying review copies to certain outlets, I am now not interested any more and they are dead to me as a brand.silverblue - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Roy apologised to Scott Wasson and said that he didn't consider The Tech Report as an unfair site, however the reason for their exclusion still hasn't been made known. I suspect he got confused between TechPowerUp and TheTechReport. :)Still, excluding anybody, intentional or otherwise, does your reputation a world of hurt, and starts to provoke questions about those who were included. What a tangled web we weave.
milli - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I don't want to burst your bubble but Scott Wasson has been very pro nVidia for the past ten years. He's just very good at doing it very subliminally, so most won't even notice. As a long time TR reader, it has been pretty obvious to me.