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

By Nathan Kirsch

Battlefield 4

bf4-screenshot

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have beem running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

bf4-settings

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark each card with these settings on the Shanghai level.

bf4-cpu-utilization

Battlefield 4 is more CPU intensive than any other game that we benchmark with as 25% of the CPU is used up during gameplay. You can see that six threads are being used and that the processor is running in Turbo mode at 3.96GHz more times than not.

bf4

Benchmark Results: In Battlefield 4 with Ultra settings at 3840×2160 we were able to average 26.12 FPS on the XFX DD Radeon R9 290 and that jumped up to 48.42 with the CrossFire setup. This is a solid 85.4% increase in performance and really made BF4 playable at the demanding 4K Ultra HD resolutions we were gaming at. This setup was about 5 FPS slower than the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 that was just released for $1500. The XFX Double Dissipation Radeon R9 290 4GB graphics card that is sold under part number R9290AEDFD for $439.99 shipped, so you are looking at about $880 for a setup like this.

bf4-time

Benchmark Results: The XFX DD R9 290 CrossFire setup ran BF4 great and hardly ever dropped below 40 FPS on our benchmark run at 3840×2160.