AMD Radeon R9 290X Review: Welcome To Hawaii

Name: AMD Radeon R9 290X Review: Welcome To Hawaii
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, October 24, 2013, 12:01 AM EDT

Crysis 3

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Crysis 3

Crysis 3, which is powered by Crytek’s proprietary CryENGINE 3 technology, is the third installment in this popular franchise. Crysis 3 is the sequel to 2011’s Crysis 2 and follows Prophet as he returns to New York a few years after the events of Crysis 2. Like previous games in the franchise, Crysis 3 has impressive visuals that can tax even the most powerful PCs when cranked up to their maximum values. We tested this game at various resolutions with all in-game graphics options set to Very High, with 4X MSAA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled and motion blur set to high.

The new Radeon R9 290X performed about on par with, or ever so slightly better than, the GeForce GTX 780 in Crysis 3, though the GTX Titan had just enough extra oomph to take the top spot. The deltas separating the fastest cards here are quite small, however.

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

Frame times were generally good across the board as well, save for a couple of major spikes on the Radeon R9 290X once again. AMD's definitely still got some driver tuning to do.

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

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