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

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize eye candy while still maintaining a playable framerate on these cards, we ran the game’s High quality benchmark routine here at a couple of resolution, topping out at 4K--excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there...

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

The Radeon R9 Nano still technically trailed the Radeon R9 Fury here, but the deltas separating the cards at both resolutions were--like the Nano itself--relatively tiny. Of course, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X remain in the top two positions overall.

Frametimes were generally good in this game as well, though all three cards showed a massive spike towards the end of the run. The Radeons took a much larger hit, but all three cards stuttered significantly for that one moment. For the rest of the run though, all three cards output frames at a relatively smooth, playable rate.

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