XFX Radeon R9 290 CrossFire Video Card Review at 4K Ultra HD

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: A single XFX Double Dissipation Radeon R9 290 was able to average ~38FPS and when a second card was added to the system we were seeing ~69FPS on our 4K panel at 3840×2160. This represents a solid 81.6% performance improvement by adding in a second card for the 2-way CrossFire setup. The bad news is that the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti GHz edition is a single-GPU setup that costs less and performed only 4FPS slower.

Benchmark Results: When you look at performance over time, the XFX DD R9 290 CrossFire setup and the Gigabyte GeForfce GTX 780 Ti GHz Edition card were very close to one another.