AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: Small But Mighty Fiji Unleashed

GTA V Performance

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series has been wildly successful for many years now, offering some of the edgiest story lines, game play tactics and objectives the gaming industry has ever seen. With psychopathic main characters, you are left in the depraved communities of Los Santos and Blaine County, to walk a path few would dare choose in real life, committing nefarious acts, robbing and pillaging to complete your objectives. In short, it's rather entertaining that you're tasked with leaving a virtual world worse off than you found it, consequences be damned. But if you're reading this, you're probably well aware of this game's story line, and the fact that it requires some serious GPU horsepower to run at smooth frame rates.
 
GTA V Performance
More Direct X 11 Testing

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GTA V

Rockstar’s PC port of GTA V was well worth the wait, giving users control over every aspect of their graphical experience, with good optimizations for both low-end and high-end hardware.

With the array of options available, we wanted to push the hardware but also achieve playable framerates across both 1440p and 4K resolutions, so we switched all the quality knobs to High or Very High and turned on FXAA, but turned off Ambient Occlusion and Tessellation.

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At 1440P, the Radeon R9 Nano was actually able to pull ahead of the Radeon R9 Fury in this game, though it dropped back in behind the Fury once the resolution was increased to 4K.

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But frame pacing on the Radeons is a real issue here. Although we used settings that resulted in relatively playable average framerates, even at 4K, the Radeons exhibited significant variations in frame time throughout the benchmark run. The GeForce also shows some variations, but its output is far more consistent, which results in smoother overall animation on-screen.


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