How to test my R9 290 properly

[Jbonham_86]

Hello everyone, I bought a R9 290 4gb from saphire recently, and I am trying a lot of games to put it to the test, and so far I have mixed impressions. There are games where it perfoms flawlessly, like sleeping dogs, borderlands 2, rage, battlefield 4 etc (everything maxed) but there some that dont go so well, like witcher 2 everything maxed, metro 2033, far cry blood dragon, crysis 3...

My rig is

i5 4670 1550 socket
8gb ram ddr3 2133
SSD samsung evo

I dont kow if the performance is what it is, if its the drivers, or just my expectations were too high, but I thought this beast would be capable of running every game available right know with 60 fps.

Also, I have run the Heaven unigine benchmark and I have been very disappointed, greatly unstable framerate dropping below 30 sometimes.

what kind of performance could I realisticly expect from this card with my hardware?

 

[Spidre]

For witcher turn off ubersampling. It is an Nvidia game, but it should run a lot better with that off.

Far Cry and Blood (from what I've heard) don't run great on AMD, but I could be wrong.

Metro is just an all around demanding game. High supersampling and such really push your card to the limit.

What resolution are you running these on? Also are you overclocking your i5 at all?

 

[Piotrsama]

Reference or custom cooler?
Check temps, it might be overheating and throttling.

 

[el etro]

But Crysis 3 maxed out is 8xMSAA. Nor GTX 780Ti run it well...

 

[Jbonham_86]

Im running on 1080p resolution, and the card is an overclocked out of the box saphire with 3 fans, the most hot I have seen it being is 73º

Is ther another benchmark like unigine that I could fetch from the internet? I have used 3d mark and has also shown bad results, like 20 fps max with all maxed out

 

[Bubbleawsome]

My gtx 770 is getting better frames than your 290 in heaven. It will stay above 30 (albiet on 1280x1024) all the time.
OTOH your expectations were a bit high. Even a GTX 780ti has issues with some of these maxed out with all the TSAA and MXTSSAA and whatever.

 

[Headfoot]

You might *actually* have some problems if you are on the 14.1 Cat drivers. I have a 290 as well. I will get completely random massive slow downs the first time I launch BF4 and it seems to affect other games as well. I normally max out BF4 (except AA) and run it 60 fps solid on 3x 1680x1050 eyefinity. Ocassionally it will chug at 30-45 fps no matter what I do until I reset the whole system.

This will happen consistently everytime I use the card for cryptocoin mining. I have to restart afterwards to regain full speed.

Another possibility is that the card is thermally throttling. When I don't have my custom fan profile on, I've seen the card downclock into the 600 core speed range from 947, which results in a huge loss of fps as well. Get MSI Afterburner set up with a decent fan profile. It only needs to be a little more aggressive to prevent throttling ever.

 

[Jbonham_86]

I dont understand the sub-par drivers of amd. Dont they have enough money or competent people in the company to make the drivers? So maybe I have to wait for a year untill there are stable drivers for a card I paid 385 $ for?

About the thottling, what is exactly? as I said, the higher temperature i have seen my card go is 72 degrees celcius after an ahour of playing blood dragon everything max, I dont think it is temperature related if I get low performance

 

[wand3r3r]

Far cry 3 isn't smooth on either side. Use 13.12 WHQL drivers, 14.1 are betas.

As mentioned some of the games mentioned cannot be ran with the max settings on any single card, much less a lesser card (not even the highest card available by what 10-15%?).

 

[lavaheadache]

I'm willing to bet your expectations are too high. Even dual cards struggle with certain settings cranked

 

[tweakboy]

Play games..... enjoy it,, instead of crunchies benchmark numbers.. gl