AMD Radeon R9 Nano Video Cards Shipping To Retail Market and FPS/Inch Matters
The folks over at Softpedia are reporting that the AMD Radeon R9 Nano super compact video card is starting to ship to retailers! Dr. Lisa Show, photographed below with the R9 Nano, said on a conference call following AMD’s quarterly result announcement that the AMD Radeon R9 Nano would be announced in the August time frame. Rumors of the card being shipped therefore isn’t that big of a shocker, but it’s a sign that the card is coming to market as planned.
The AMD Radeon R9 Nano features the powerful AMD Fiji GPU and is just six inches long! The card has a 175W TDP and uses a signle 8-pin PCIe power connector. AMD said that the Radeon R9 Nano should offer a 2x Perforformance/Watt improvement over the Radeon R9 290X and the Hawaii GPU. Overall performance is reported to be around the same performance as a Radeon R9 290X, but at obviously half the power consumption and in a tiny form factor. Many ITX enthusiasts are looking to this card as the size and power draw is appealing to all small form factor fans.
A Korean blog has pictures of what appears to be embargoed benchmarks footnotes for the Nano. These results were removed from the image, but the text shows that AMD ran the Unigine Heaven Benchmark in 4K (38402160 resolution, extreme present, 0xAA). According to the text on the purportedly real slide, the Nano has an efficiency of 0.152 fps/Watt in the 4K benchmark, whereas the R9 290X has an efficiency of 0.076 fps/Watt. If you do a really rough calculation assuming the card really is running at 175W then you can come up with the fact that the Radeon R9 Nano was running the benchmark at 26.6FPS.
The other interesting tidbit in the slides footnote is that AMD is using a FPS/Inch metric. The AMD Radeon R9 Nano scored 4.0fps per inch versus the AMD Radeon R9 290X scored just 1.6 fps per inch on the same system! That just goes to show that having a longer card length doesn’t mean you’ll have better performance per inch! This is the first time that we’ve ever seen about the performance per inch for a video card discussed before and we have a feeling the web will have a field day with performance per inch jokes!