AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: Small But Mighty Fiji Unleashed


Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-5960X octal-core processor and 16GB of Corsair DDR4 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 optimal memory performance and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System
Intel Core i7 Powered
Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-5960X
(3GHz, Octa-Core)
Asus X99 Deluxe
(Intel X99 Chipset)

Radeon R9 Nano
Radeon R9 390
Radeon R9 Fury
Radeon R9 Fury X
GeForce GTX 970 mini
GeForce GTX 980 Ti

16GB Corsair DDR4-2133
OCZ Vertex 4
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network
Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64
AMD Catalyst v15.20 Beta
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v355.82

Benchmarks Used:
Unigine Heaven v4
3DMark "Fire Strike"
Thief
MIddle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Metro Last Light Redux
GTA V
FRAPS

Unigine Heaven v4.0 Benchmark
Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming

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.


Unigine Heaven

h1

h2

The AMD Radeon R9 Nano finished just behind the Radeon R9 Fury here, but well ahead of the R9 390 or similarly-sized GeForce GTX 970 mini (the Asus GeForce GTX 970 Direct-CU mini to be exact).  Though its specifications looks most similar to the Fury X, the Nano's power-friendly profile doesn't allow the card to run at full-tilt all of the time, hence its somewhat lower--but still pretty darn good--performance.

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