AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB Video Card Review

Tomb Raider

On March 5th, 2013 Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.

The game has been built on Crystal Dynamics’s game engine called the “Crystal Engine” and the graphics look fantastic. AMD and Crystal Dyanmic’s worked on a new technology called TressFX Hair, which AMD describes as the worlds first in-game implementation of a real-time, per-strand hair physics system for this game title. We set the image quality to ultimate for benchmarking, but we disabled TressFX Hair under the advanced tab to be fair to NVIDIA graphics cards that don’t support the feature.

Benchmark Results: The GeForce GTX 760 SLI setup wasn’t able to outperform the single Radeon R9 290X setup at 5760 x 1080! The Radeon R9 290X was designed to push Ultra HD games and it is amazing to see how well it does on a triple monitor setup in games like Tom Raider. We are running at nearly 60 FPS with a single card running three 1080P monitors! Impressive no matter how you look at it and this with Ultra image quality settings!