The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTThe Talos Principle
Croteam’s first person puzzle and exploration game The Talos Principle may not involve much action, but the game’s lush environments still put even fast video cards to good use. Coupled with the use of 4x MSAA at Ultra quality, and even a tranquil puzzle game like Talos can make a good case for more powerful video cards.
With the Talos Principle the R9 Nano is once again looking good. Performance relative to the R9 Fury X slips a bit more than in the past, now trailing the fastest Fiji by about 15%, while the card trails the slower R9 Fury by 4% at 2560x1440 and 7% at 3840x2160. At least within the AMD lineup, the only other thing of note here is the R9 390X, which is never too far away from the R9 Nano (just at substantially more power).
Otherwise to make our usual size and power comparisons, everything is in AMD’s favor. The R9 Nano is well ahead of the GTX 970 Mini, beating it by 35% even at the worse for AMD resolution of 1920x1080. Similarly, the R9 Nano enjoys a 10%+ lead over the power-similar GTX 980, with the lead growing with the resolution.
Finally, we haven’t made too many R9 285 (Tonga) comparisons, so let’s throw one of those in. Like GTX 980, R9 285 is fairly close to R9 Nano in power consumption. However for performance it’s no contest; the R9 Nano nearly doubles the performance of the R9 285 under this game.
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ImSpartacus - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Good to see that Anandtech got a Nano.Wreckage - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I'm sure they agreed to give a "fair" review. I think everyone should wait for independent reviews after the whole Roy Taylor incident.HOOfan 1 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I bet AMD knew the numbers would be exactly the same at all the big name sites. It is the conclusions they were worried about.close - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Wreckage, you would say that of course after being "motivated" by no less then two 980 graphic cards as gifts just in the last 6 weeks. What kind of credibility do you expect after this?theduckofdeath - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
New review on a hardware review site, comment section full of bitching.Yeah, this is the tech news of 2015. Whining and trolling instead of discussing tech.
LoganPowell - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
It's too bad that the AMD Radeon r9 Nano does so bad among consumer based rankings (see http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-hard-dri... for example...)theNiZer - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Spot on mate! (sry for double posting)gw74 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
The R9 Nano was about to make me interested in AMD cards finally. On finding out about what they've been up to denying review copies to certain outlets, I am now not interested any more and they are dead to me as a brand.silverblue - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Roy apologised to Scott Wasson and said that he didn't consider The Tech Report as an unfair site, however the reason for their exclusion still hasn't been made known. I suspect he got confused between TechPowerUp and TheTechReport. :)Still, excluding anybody, intentional or otherwise, does your reputation a world of hurt, and starts to provoke questions about those who were included. What a tangled web we weave.
milli - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I don't want to burst your bubble but Scott Wasson has been very pro nVidia for the past ten years. He's just very good at doing it very subliminally, so most won't even notice. As a long time TR reader, it has been pretty obvious to me.