AMD Radeon R9 290 Review: Fast And $400, But Is It Consistent?

Test Setup And Benchmarks

Because Radeon R9 290X can be so bipolar, it’s important to spell out how we’re testing all of these cards today.

Typically, we run benchmarks in rapid succession. This means that the GPU remains warm after its first run. This matters very little to cards that operate at one clock rate. But it makes more of a difference on boards with Nvidia’s GPU Boost technology, which won’t stretch up as high when certain limits are exceeded. AMD’s clocking mechanism is even more sensitive to thermal and power conditions, necessitating an even more regimented approach to testing.

For every test we run, we spend five minutes in-game, playing, before launching our benchmark sequence. In a metric like Metro: Last Light, where we use a benchmark tool, we run multiple iterations prior to starting the measurement.

In this way, we’re sure the card is at its maximum operating temperature, yielding the lowest benchmark results, but best representing the experience you’d get from these cards after just a few minutes of playing your favorite title.

We’re also changing up the benchmarking a bit. In preparation for today’s piece, we re-ran every single test. We standardized settings across resolutions to better track scaling, and, again, we’re subjecting every board to five minutes of in-game time before firing up our testing sequence. As a result, we're presenting slightly different numbers from our 290X review, but the data should be more precise, too.

Test Hardware And Software