Titanfall is a similar story, with strong performance with maximum settings other than the Anti-Aliasing set to 4xMSAA and V-Sync set to Double Buffered, we knew it wouldn’t hit 60 FPS, so the Titanfall V-Sync bug didn’t impact the test.
Watch_Dogs up next and some rather bizarre results. With everything maxxed out, the game did not perform well, in fact it performed in a really strange way!
Not even reaching 20 FPS the frame performance is really jagged and irregular. The game was unplayable but it wasn’t apparent this type of frame activity was going on. This was an un-modded install of Watch_Dogs so no third party software is to blame, just not an AMD game!
Conclusion
With the AMD Radeon 300 Series release just round the corner does it make sense to go out and buy one of these cards at the end of its life? With the price of the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X Tri-X on the Amazon UK store currently £271.94 it really depends. ATI fan boy, then yes, though you are going to be around 15% slower than the MSI NVIDIA GTX 970 Gaming Twin Frozr V at the same price.
Need a second card for your Cross Fire rig? Then yes, pending price drops mean your system, if it has two of these cards, will have 8Gb of ultra fast GDDR5, that is going to take some beating.
If you don’t want to spend money on the new R9 390X and you are upgrading, this will also be a fantastic card, but we cannot help feel as though we are left a little disappointed with this card. Why? We didn’t really see the card utilized apart from the synthetic tests and we also feel the drivers are still a little behind the hardware, both down to AMD, not Sapphire.
We have an MSI NVIDIA GTX 970 Gaming Twin Frozr V kicking about the office and we can’t see why you wouldn’t buy this card, other than the reason above, this the GTX970 would be your choice of card for your first rig or if you wanted an upgrade that maximised your performance at this price point.
This is not a bad graphics card, and the Sapphire bling factor is always nice to have in any rig, but you need to be an ATI fan to really love this card.
Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X Tri-X Graphics Card Review
Package and Bundle - 8.7
Performance - 8
Price - 9
Consumer Experience - 8.5
8.6
If you don't want to spend money on the new R9 390X and you are upgrading, this will also be a fantastic card, but we cannot help feel as though we are left a little disappointed with this card. Why? We didn't really see the card utilized apart from the synthetic tests and we also feel the drivers are still a little behind the hardware, both down to AMD, not Sapphire.
