AMD Radeon R9 290X Review: Welcome To Hawaii
Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v13.11b1 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v331.40 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v4 3DMark "Fire Strike" Bioshock Infinite Hitman: Absolution Alien vs. Predator Metro Last Light Sleeping Dogs Crysis 3 FRAPS + FCAT |
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Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
As we mentioned earlier, the Radeon R9 290X offers two modes of operation, thanks to its dual-BIOS switch. In one mode (Quiet), the GPU fan speed will top out at 40% of max. In the other mode (Uber), the fan speed will climb up to 55%, which allows to card to attain higher clocks, for longer periods of time, but at the expense of some additional noise.
In both modes, the Radeon R9 290X finished just behind the GeForce GTX 780 in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, with the GeForce GTX Titan sitting atop the stack by a few percentage points. Performance is well ahead of the 280X, however.
