AMD Radeon R9 290 Review: Hawaii Just Got Cheaper

Name: AMD Radeon R9 290 Review: Hawaii Just Got Cheaper
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 05, 2013, 12:01 AM EDT

Alien vs. Predator

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Alien vs. Predator

The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion, and high-quality shadow features available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11-related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.

The Radeon R9 290 cards led the pack in the Alien vs. Predator benchmark, besting all of the other cards at both resolutions, including the $1000 GeForce GTX Titan. The new R9 290 wasn't quite able to catch the more powerful R9 290X here, but the deltas separating the cards were relatively small.

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Looking at the frame times in this game, as reported by FCAT, doesn't reveal any major problems. Frame pacing is similar across all of the cards, though the fastest products consistently offer the lowest frame times across the entirety of the test, as you would expect.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GPU, Hawaii, R9, 290

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com