AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review
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Page 1:Introduction
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Page 2:Detailed Overview
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Page 3:How We Tested
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Page 4:Results: The Witcher 3 And GTA V
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Page 5:Results: Metro Last Light And Bioshock Infinite
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Page 6:Results: Tomb Raider And Battlefield 4
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Page 7:Results: Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor And Thief
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Page 8:Results (DirectX 12): Ashes Of The Singularity
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Page 9:Results: Power Consumption And Efficiency
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Page 10:Results: Frequencies And Temperatures
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Page 11:Results: Fan RPM And Noise
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Page 12:Conclusion
Results: Metro Last Light And Bioshock Infinite
Metro Last Light
Let’s take a look at a classic game that's so demanding we can't help but retain it as a benchmark. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 comes out ahead in Metro Last Light across all resolutions, including UHD. The Radeon R9 Nano’s performance might not be good enough for a win, but it is ample for playable frame rates at 3840x2160.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 Mini does surprisingly well, beating a factory-overclocked Radeon R9 390X all the way to our highest test resolution. This came as a surprise to us. Old though it may be, Metro just isn't well-optimized on AMD's hardware, it seems. At least the performance we're reporting is playable.
- 01 FHD FPS Charts
- 11 FHD FPS Curves
- 02 QHD FPS Charts
- 12 QHD FPS Curves
- 03 UHD FPS Charts
- 13 UHD FPS Curves
The Radeon R9 Nano’s anything-but-smooth (red) curve at Ultra HD shows the strict power consumption limit in action. AMD's limit results in a varying clock rate, which keeps the card from doing better in this benchmark. The results are still alright, especially when you consider the card's low power consumption.
- 21 FHD FT Render Time
- 22 QHD FT Render Time
- 23 UHD FT Render Time
Normalization via the frame time averages doesn’t really show anything new. The different frame render times attributable to a constantly changing core frequency are easy to spot.
- 31 FHD FT vs. Average
- 32 QHD FT vs. Average
- 33 UHD FT vs. Average
The last graph gives us the bottom line: neither AMD's Radeon R9 Nano nor any other graphics card encounter extreme spikes. They all stay below a calm 5ms of variance between any two frames.
- 41 FHD FT Variance Between Frames
- 42 QHD FT Variance Between Frames
- 43 UHD FT Variance Between Frames
Bioshock Infinite
It’s striking that the factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 980 dominates the Radeon R9 Nano across all resolutions. Even Nvidia’s smaller GeForce 970 Mini (OC) with its 3.5GB of usable graphics memory scores points by leading the Radeon R9 390X and its 8GB of GDDR5 across each resolution, including Ultra HD. By the way, all of the graphics cards we're testing provide playable frame rates at 4K. This is an uncommon and certainly welcome sight.
- 01 FHD FPS Charts
- 11 FHD FPS Curves
- 02 QHD FPS Charts
- 12 QHD FPS Curves
- 03 UHD FPS Charts
- 13 UHD FPS Curves
The frame render times don’t show AMD or Nvidia pulling ahead, so the competition ends up fairly balanced. The only exception is AMD's Radeon R9 390X, which shows more spikes overall and gets worse as resolution increases.
- 21 FHD FT Render Time
- 22 QHD FT Render Time
- 23 UHD FT Render Time
After normalizing the graph with the help of each card’s average frame time, the above observation becomes even easier to see. AMD's boards are worse when it comes to frame render time variance, but the Radeon R9 390X is the only card to do badly enough for it to be perceivable during gameplay.
- 31 FHD FT vs. Average
- 32 QHD FT vs. Average
- 33 UHD FT vs. Average
Our smoothness analysis confirms these findings as well. The Radeon R9 390X’s performance is worse in the middle of the benchmark. The culprit is found in the high overclock all the way to 1100MHz. If the clock rate is set to 1000MHz, then frame time variance decreases significantly. We reproduced this behavior in the lab.
- 41 FHD FT Variance Between Frames
- 42 QHD FT Variance Between Frames
- 43 UHD FT Variance Between Frames
- Introduction
- Detailed Overview
- How We Tested
- Results: The Witcher 3 And GTA V
- Results: Metro Last Light And Bioshock Infinite
- Results: Tomb Raider And Battlefield 4
- Results: Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor And Thief
- Results (DirectX 12): Ashes Of The Singularity
- Results: Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Results: Frequencies And Temperatures
- Results: Fan RPM And Noise
- Conclusion
This card is a very tough sell for AMD, specially since ITX cases that can house current long cards are not hard to find or weird enough to make short cards a thing.
It's nice to see it's up there with the GTX970 in terms of efficiency, since HTPCs need that to be viable and the card has no apparent shortcomings from what I could read here.
All in all, it needs to drop a bit in price. It's not "650 nice", but making it "~500 nice" sounds way better. Specially when the 970 mini is at 400.
Cheers!
The table will be fixed, this was a copy issue
well this card is for the smallest case ... not the easy to find huge long itx case.
I personaly find long itx cases useless ... they are very near to Matx case in size .. and people will pick up MATX ovet ITX any time if the size is the same.
BUT for 170mm long card ? this is a winner.
the only thing killing this product is the lack of HDMI2.0 which is very important for itx .. ITX are the console like PC near the tv.
I guess that they were thinking about DisplayPort?
For a $650 bucks video card. I'd go with a 980TI and use a Raven RVZ01 if I want an ITX build with performance.
It would be interesting to see whether under volting/clocking a FuryX could approach similar efficiency, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that most of them draw a chunk more power. Still, if you told me 6 months ago that AMD would have a high end card that's competitive with Maxwell in both performance and efficiency (particularly the latter), I'm not sure I'd have believed it.
They did? And that's oddly specific...
Anyway, it's a good card, but too expensive, as the extra performance over a 970 isn't worth $300.
Also, nvidia needs only to release a mini it's 989, and this niche will be filled.
It's actually a great card, and I would use it if I had it, but the value just isn't there.
I wonder if working with Apple's rubbed off on AMD, they seem to be thinking of small form factors more often lately.
I am far from being a NVIDIA fanboy but... I guess I don't see the point in this product if it is $300 more expensive than the 970 Mini and cannot handle 4K with at least 60 FPS.
Nobody. That's the answer.
At 600 bucks it is an answer to a question no one asked.
Hopefully after it's out a while the market will determine a more realistic price.
Mini-ITX is a good solution for living room PCs. All this funny gaming towers are too big and ugly to use it in a well-designed room. And to be honest: the whole world is a big market with a lot of different trends.
I'm just preparing a mini-ITX DIY/Roundup with shorter cards and different Skylake CPUs to show which card goes well with which CPU. Starting with R7 360, over GTX 950 Mini, 960 Mini, 380 ITX, 970 Mini and up to R9 Nano. I'm not sure about a further translation into English, but we got in Germany so much positive response for all of our different mini-ITX projects, that I'm sure it is worth to build real rigs to find an objective conclusion.
I have a MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning in my hands, but it is definitely nothing for my living room. I'm playing in my lab