The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review
by Ryan Smith on April 8, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
Battlefield 4
Our current major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has finally reached a point where it’s stable enough for benchmark use, giving us the ability to profile one of the most popular and strenuous shooters out there. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
As is the case in a few of our other games, whether it’s AMD who’s winning or NVIDIA who’s winning depends on the resolution. At 2160p with Ultra settings (and no MSAA) it’s AMD on top, with the 295X2 capable of delivering 68fps. This is safely past the 60fps threshold needed to ensure that minimum framerates don’t drop below 30fps in multiplayer. Otherwise at 1440p the NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti SLI setup pulls ahead, however the 295X2 is right on its tail.
In the meantime this game is also a good example of just how much faster than the 7990 the 295X2 is, despite the fact that both products are based on high-end (for their time) 28nm GPUs. The 295X2 ends up being over 40% faster at both 2160p and 1440p, showing just how far AMD has come in single card dual-GPU performance in the last year.
Shifting to our delta percentage benchmarks, we once more find that the 295X2 has no problem staying within the 20% threshold needed for smooth frame pacing. Though overall NVIDIA does hold an edge, especially at 1440p.
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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.