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

Thief

Thief is a series of stealth video games in which the player takes the role of Garrett, a master thief in a fantasy/steampunk world resembling a cross between the Late Middle Ages and the Victorian era, with more advanced technologies interspersed. Thief is the fourth title in the Thief series, developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix on February 25, 2014.

We ran Thief with the image quality settings set at normal with VSYNC disabled.

Thief appears to be running on the six physical cores of the Intel Core i7-4960X processor and averages around 17-24% CPU usage from what we were able to tell from the CPU utilization meter that is built into the Windows 8.1 task manager.

Benchmark Results: The XFX DD R9 290 averaged 38.20 FPS and the 2-way CrossFire setup averaged 67.14 FPS in Thief with normal image quality settings. This is a 75.8% performance increase and oddly enough the lowest performance gain of any title that we looked at today. The performance difference between the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 and AMD Radeon R9 290 CrossFire was less than 2FPS, so it looks like Thief doesn’t really scale that well. Thief wasn’t mentioned in the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 reviewers guide as well, which was very odd as it is an AMD backed game title and the launch title for AMD TrueAudio technology.

Benchmark Results: The performance over time chart showed that the XFX DD R9 290 CrossFire setup never dropped below 50 FPS during the benchmark run!