AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: Small But Mighty Fiji Unleashed

Name: AMD Radeon R9 Nano
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 08:00 AM EDT

Square Enix set the tone for Thief by saying, "Garrett, the Master Thief, steps out of the shadows into the City. In this treacherous place, where the Baron’s Watch spreads a rising tide of fear and oppression, his skills are the only things he can trust. Even the most cautious citizens and their best-guarded possessions are not safe from his reach." The Thief series has been popular for years, not only for its interesting story lines and unique gameplay, but because the games have consistently featured excellent graphics and imagery and leveraged bleeding edge technology, like AMD's Mantle API, for example.

Thief

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

thief screenshot
Thief

th2

th3

The Radeons performed very well in this game at 1440P, and exhibited a similar performance trend with the new Nano finishing just behind the Radeon R9 Fury, though it was able to outpace the GTX 980 Ti. With the resolution cranked up to 3840x2160, though, the Radeon R9 Fury X and GeForce GTX 980 Ti returned to their familiar spots at the top of the charts.

Although average framerates looked good for the Radeons here, the R9 Nano and Fury X box exhibited some stutter, with the largest spikes coming in the early part of the benchmark. The cards spent most of their time below the 33ms mark (which is a good thing), but frames were delivered in a more inconsistent manner in comparison to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, Mini-ITX, GPU, Nano, fiji

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