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

Next up, we have a few CrossFire vs. SLI tests with the Sleeping Dogs and Bioshock Infinite benchmarks.

The Radeon R9 290X cards showed excellent performance scaling in the Sleeping Dogs benchmark at the higher resolution, nearly doubling the frame rate exactly. Scaling at the lower resolution was still good, but nowhere near as high.

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

And thankfully there were no frame latency issues to speak of in this game either. In fact, the Radeons and GeForces exhibited similar behavior throughout the benchmark run.

In terms of average frame rates, the Radeon R9 290X CrossFire configuration also showed good performance scaling in the Bioshock Infinite benchmark. At both resolutions, frame rates increased by a larger percentage on the Radeons.

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

This game, however, suffered from a multitude of runt and dropped frames as recorded by FCAT. The GeForces’ line is about as smooth as you can get, save for a couple of minor spikes. The Radeons’ numbers are all over the map, though.

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