PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB Video Card Review

Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman: Arkham Origins is an action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montral. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it follows the 2011 video game Batman: Arkham City and is the third main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. It was released worldwide on October 25, 2013.

For testing we used DirectX11 Enhanced, FXAA High Anti-Aliasing and with all the bells and whistles turned on. It should be noted that V-Sync was turned off and that NVIDIA’s PhysX software engine was also disabled to ensure both the AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards were rendering the same objects. We manually ran FRAPS on the single player game instead of using the built-in benchmark to be as real world as we possibly could. We ran FRAPS in the Bat Cave, which was one of the only locations that we could easily run FRAPS for a couple minutes and get it somewhat repeatable.

The CPU usage for Batman: Arkham Origins was surprising low with just 10% of the Intel Core i7-4960X being used by this particular game title. You can see that the bulk of the work is being done by one CPU core.

Benchmark Results: The PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X was slightly slower than the ASUS Poseidon GTX 780 ($599) and a decent way behind the GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards (starting at $669). The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X was ~15% faster than the XFX Double Dissipation Radeon R9 290 on our 4K panel at 3840×2160.

Benchmark Results: When you look at performance over time, the PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X was just barely able to stay above 40 FPS across the whole run on our Ultra HD (3840×2160) test setup.