The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
Crysis 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 “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 2014.
Crysis 3 is another title that regular favors NVIDIA cards, and despite AMD being able to close the gap through superior Crossfire scaling the 295X2 still trails the GTX 780 Ti SLI at all resolutions. That said, AMD does at least make it relatively close, and all the while manages to crack 60fps at 2160p with Medium settings, which is about as good as any dual-GPU setup can hope for in Crysis 3 right now.
When it comes to our look at frame pacing, Crysis 3 is the one game where even the XDMA-equipped 295X2 is struggling to meet our own standards for acceptable frame pacing. Our normal threshold here is 20%, which the 295X2 just misses. The remaining difference is under 2% and in all likelihood should not be a significant problem for smoothness (it certainly hasn’t been an issue in our testing), but nonetheless it’s a game that could stand to see further improvements in AMD’s drivers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
131 Comments
View All Comments
eotheod - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Same performance as crossfire 290X? Might be time to do a Mini-ITX build. Half the price of Titan Z also makes it a winner.Torrijos - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
A lot of compute benchmark see no improvement from a single 290X...What is happening?
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Most of these compute benchmarks do not scale with multiple GPUs. We include them for completeness, if only to not so subtly point out that not everything scales well.CiccioB - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
Why not adding more real life computing tests like iRay that runs both for CUDA and OpenCL?Syntethic tests are really meaningless as they depends more on the particular istructions used to do... ermm.. nothing?
fourzeronine - Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - link
iRay runs on CUDA only. LuxRender should be used for GPU raytrace benchmarking. http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMarkAlthough the best renderers that support OpenCL are hybrid systems that only solve some of the problems on GPU and a card like this would never be fully utilized.
The best OpenCL bench mark to have would be an agisoft photoscan dense point cloud generation.
Musaab - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I have one question why didn't you use 2 R9 290X with water cool or 2 GTX 780Ti with water cool. I hate this marketing Mumbo Jumbo. if I want to pay this money I will chose two cards from above with water cool and with some OC work they will feed this card the dust and for the same money I can buy 2 R9 290 or 2 GTX 780.Musaab - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Sorry I mean three R9290 or three GTX 780spartaman64 - Sunday, June 1, 2014 - link
i doubt you can afford 3 of them and water cool them and 3 of them would have a very high tdp also many people would run into space restraints and the r9 295x2 out performs 2 780 ti in slikrutou - Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - link
Because water blocks and radiators don't grow on trees. Reviewers only test what they're given, all of which are stock.patrickjp93 - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
They pretty much do grow on trees. You can get even a moderately good liquid cooling loop for 80 bucks.