AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review: Hawaii x 2

Name: AMD Radeon R9 295X2 Review: Hawaii x 2
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 08, 2014, 08:00 AM EDT

Metro Last Light is your typical post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment; rather, you’re left to deal with life, or lack thereof, more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. Metro Last Light boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform and includes a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. This title also supports NVIDIA PhysX technology for impressive in-game physics effects. We tested the game at resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with its in-game image quality options set to their High Quality mode, with DOF effects disabled.

Metro Last Light

DirecX11 Gaming Performance

Metro Last Light

The Radeon R9 295X2 put up some impressive numbers in the Metro Last Light benchmark as well. The performance trend we've seen throughout much of our previous testing played out again here at all three resolutions, with the GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI setup taking the lead, followed by the Radeon R9 295X2 and then the Radeon R9 290X CrossFire configuration.

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We saw some funky frametime variations in Metro Last Light on the Radeon R9 295X2 that wasn't present throughout the Radeon R9 290X CrossFire run according to our FCAT data, but the frame rate was high enough for it not to be perceptible here. Still, it looks like AMD's got some additional drive tuning to do to get frame pacing right in this game.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, Hawaii, 295x2

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