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

Crysis 3

Like the others, it is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, using their CryEngine 3. Released in February 2013, it is well known to make even powerful system choke. It has probably the highest graphics requirements of any game available today. Unfortunately, Crytek didnt include a standardized benchmark with Crysis 3. While the enemies will move about on their own, we will attempt to keep the same testing process for each test.

Crysis 3 has a reputation for being highly resource intensive. Most graphics cards will have problems running Crysis 3 at maximum settings, so we settled on no AA with the graphics quality mostly set to Very High with 16x AF. We disabled v-sync and left the motion blur amount on medium.

Crysis 3 appeared to run for the most part on just 3 CPU threads and used up about 15-18% of our Intel Core i7-4960X processor with these settings. Notice that the processor speed was at 3.53GHz and we very seldom, if ever, saw the processor go into turbo mode on Crysis 3.

Benchmark Results: The XFX Double Dissipation R9 290 averaged 17.68 FPS on Cysis 3 and with the CrossFire setup this jumped up to 33.39 FPS. This is an increase of 88.9%, which is the most that we have seen yet. Having a pair of Radeon R9 290 cards in CrossFire really made Crysis 3 perform well and got us above the 30 FPS mark on average.

Benchmark Results: It is extremely hard to replicate the same run over and over manually with FRAPs on Crysis 3, but we gave it out best shot. As you can see the XFX DD Radeon R9 290 CrossFire setup had a significant drop below 30 FPS in the middle of the benchmark run, but that was it.