The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size

Grand Theft Auto V

The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.

On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.

Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.

Closing things out with one of our most strenuous games, we have a mixed bag for the R9 Nano. Performance relative to the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury is ending on a high note, with the R9 Nano trailing the other Fiji cards by around 10% and 4% respectively. The R9 Nano continues to impress in its ability to deliver performance so close to the R9 Fury, and games like GTA V are prime examples of this.

The catch for AMD here is that on an absolute basis, GTA really forces you to either compromise on quality or resolution if you want to hit 60fps. In this case we’d need to drop all the way to 1920x1080 for 60fps on the Nano, and this eats away at AMD’s intrinsic advantage over NVIDIA where AMD’s performance drops off more slowly with higher resolutions. As a result the power-similar GTX 980 is close in performance to the R9 Nano at 2560x1440 and takes a small lead at 1920x1080.

Otherwise AMD at least looks solid on a size-wise comparison. The R9 Nano holds a comfortable lead over the GTX 970 Mini, ranging from 12% at 1920x1080 up to 31% at 3840x2160 high quality.

99th percentile framerates however are simply not in AMD’s favor here. Despite the fact that the GTX 980 only has 4GB of VRAM as well, the R9 Nano simply can’t catch up to the GTX 980.