There are a couple things to note:
First the 290 is on water, not reference air.
Secondly the core goes high but the vram does not on his old Lightning. F2F has this card now, it is one of the first Lightnings to roll out of MSI and due to the shortage it has the Elpida memory.
I didn't have my card long enough but when I compared his Bioshock score to mine one thing become quite clear to me...
I got a huge uplift off my initial vram OC (My card came out of the box at 1163MHz with stock vram).
Here is our back and forth when I first obtained the card...
F2F: @ 1320/1650 Avg - 116.41
Balla: @ Stock 1163 core boost Avg - 106.04
F2F: I was getting Avg - 111 fps with 1150
Balla: 114.44 avg @ stock core /w +550 memory offset
Balla: 117.80 Avg @ 1215/1777 (Did I win yet?)
Why am I posting this?
Well I found it strange that my card at 1215/1777 was faster than his Lightning at 1320/1650... Now weather that is because of Haswell vs Ivy @ 1080p with these cards or something else I can't say as my time was cut short.
However I do plan to explore it a bit later both with F2F and with my own card. If the memory offset makes that much of a difference at 1080p, I imagine it would make more of a difference at 1600p but I have neither a card to test or a 1600p monitor, but face just got a 1440 so I will start pestering him instead of you Elfear