AMD Radeon R9 290X review

The R9 290X is a new breed of Radeon graphics card designed to provide gamers with all the power they need to play the latest games at very high resolutions and at the highest graphics settings. This AMD graphics card clearly has the Nvidia GTX 780 firmly in its sights.

It’s more than just a powerful graphics card, though. The R9 290X also contains an audio processor called TrueAudio. Instead of relying on the PC’s CPU for audio processing, the R9 290X processes audio itself. This takes the load off the CPU and leaves headroom for fancy audio effects. For example, AMD says this technology could use positional data from the game you’re playing to produce properly rendered and more accurate 3D sound. That’s just one benefit, and as TrueAudio is a programmable system we’re sure talented game developers will put it to good use. We look forward to testing this out when TrueAudio-optimised games arrive.

Another neat new feature is the ability to use two R9 290Xs in CrossFire mode without the use of a CrossFire ribbon. Again, we couldn’t test the card in CrossFire mode because we only had one R9 290X, but AMD says there’s no drop in performance from not having the CrossFire ribbon bridge.

The R9 290X’s graphics processor, codename Hawaii, can operate at a maximum clock speed of 1GHz and has 2,816 stream processors. This is paired with 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at a clock speed of 1,250MHz. The R9 290X also has a very wide 512-bit memory interface that allows a maximum memory bandwidth of up to 320GB/s.

When you’re working on the desktop the graphics processor ticks over at an economical 300MHz, but quickly boosts to 1GHz when running games to provide maximum performance. The R9 290X is very quiet, even when playing graphically challenging games, but it does have a tendency to emit a high-pitched whine occasionally, which can be annoying.

The card’s graphics performance is phenomenal. It produced an average frame rate of 107fps in Dirt Showdown at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to Ultra. To put this frame rate in context, the excellent Nvidia GTX Titan produced an average frame rate of 91.2fps in the same test and the GTX 780 produced an average frame rate of 88.7fps. With the resolution lowered to 1,280×720 and graphics quality reduced to High, the R9 290X produced an average frame rate of 115fps, while the GTX Titan and GTX 780 weren’t far behind with an average frame rate of 113.2fps. You won’t notice any slowdown with average frame rates like these.

We also subjected the R9 290X to our more challenging Crysis 2 benchmark, but that didn’t trouble it either. The R9 290X produced a suitably smooth average frame rate of 59.6fps at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and with graphics quality set to Ultra, compared to the GTX Titan’s 49.6fps and the GTX 780’s 48.3fps in the same test.

Neither of these games caused the R9 290X to break into a sweat, so we subjected it to our new Crysis 3 benchmark. With all graphics options set to maximum at a resolution of 1,920×1,080, the R9 290X produced an average frame rate of 32.6fps. The minimum frame rate was 24fps, while the highest was an impressively smooth 48fps. In play, the game looked and felt superb, and we had no complaints during the level we played.

VERY HIGH-RESOLUTION GAMING

With the advent of Ultra HD (4K) TVs and the increasing popularity of monitors with a maximum resolution of 2,560×1,440, Full HD gaming is no longer the graphical challenge it once was. Gamers now want to play the latest titles on very high resolution screens, and the R9 290X’s 4GB of memory makes it a good card for doing exactly that.

We ran Dirt Showdown at a resolution of 2,560×1,440 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra graphics quality, and were more than pleased to see a slippery smooth average frame rate of 95fps. In Crysis 2 with the same settings the R9 290X delivered an equally impressive 59.7fps. Sadly, the R9 290X suffered during our Crysis 3 benchmark at 2,560×1,440 and produced an average frame rate of just 22fps, which is too jerky for comfortable play. You won’t need to reduce graphics settings much to get super-demanding games such as Crysis 3 to play smoothly, though, even at this huge resolution.

MULTI-MONITOR GAMING

Sadly, we couldn’t test the R9 290X with an Ultra HD screen, but we did run our Dirt Showdown and Crysis 2 benchmarks in triple-monitor Eyefinity mode at a resolution of 5,760×1,080 with graphics quality set to Ultra, and we were mightily impressed with the results.

The R9 290X produced an average frame rate of 66fps in Dirt Showdown and 29.4fps in Crysis 2. You’ll have to compromise graphics quality to play some of the latest, most graphically complex games, but many will play fine at the highest quality on three monitors.

The R9 290X is an awesome graphics card. It doesn’t have the high performance of the Radeon HD 7990, but it’s not a million miles away. That’s all the more impressive given that the R9 290X is a single-GPU graphics card whereas the HD 7990 is a dual-GPU card. Even so, if you need to play the latest games at the very highest resolutions then you should buy the HD 7990.

The R9 290X compares well with the GTX 780, beating it in our benchmark tests, which is astonishing given that the R9 290X’s quoted retail price is cheaper than that of the GTX 780. That makes the R9 290X a relative bargain and the card to buy if you can’t stretch to the Ultimate award-winning Radeon HD 7990.