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

Metro Last Light Redux Performance

Page 7: Metro Last Light Redux Performance

Metro Last Light Redux 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 Redux 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, though we left them disable here. We tested the game at resolutions of 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 with its in-game image quality options set to their High Quality mode, with DOF effects disabled.

Metro Last Light Redux

DirecX11 Gaming Performance

Metro Last Light Redux

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X duke it out for the top spot, with a slight edge going to the 980 Ti. The Radeon R9 Nano slots in just behind the R9 Fury again, by a couple of percentage points.

If we look at frame times in this game (captured at 4K), we see there are no major issues to point out with any of the cards. To keep the graphs easily readable, we kept the numbers confined to the new Radeon R9 Nano, the Fury X, and the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. And we only captured at the more taxing 4K resolution.

The purple bar designates (roughly) the 30 FPS / 33ms mark. And since none of the cards put up playable framerates at 4K with the high-quality settings we used in this game, they all spend most of the test with frame times well above 33ms.