28 Nov 2019 - Graphics card reviewed

While some games have more powerful requirements than this GPU, the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition is only really challenged by the most demanding games released today, but normally it is more than capable of running games with a stable frame rate at 1080p. All games with system requirements of DirectX 11 or lower are met by this card.

We take a look at game performance achieved on this graphics card when running 2019 popular games. This short Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition game hardware review looks at the graphics card frame rate performance on Ultra graphics settings at 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions. In terms of performance against the most demanding games today this graphics card can play 429 of the 1000 most demanding PC games beating their recommended requirements.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and saw it deliver playable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 115 FPS, Medium: 90 FPS, High: 61 FPS and Ultra: 44 FPS. We proceeded to look at Microsoft Flight Simulator to see how that compared and predict that it will return a weak 21 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

With PC gamers looking for larger screen sizes like 1440p we tested the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare which yielded a playable performance. Its FPS results for the graphics settings are as follows - L: 88FPS, M: 69FPS, H: 46FPS, U: 33FPS. Another popular game we researched with this card was Microsoft Flight Simulator and that was weak. This graphics card is predicted to deliver 16 FPS at Ultra 1440p. Another popular title was eFootball PES 2020 which gets reasonable results with a 50FPS on Ultra 1440p. Gaming at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition is certainly a viable option for these higher gaming resolutions. Remember that if you suffer some 1440p FPS drops the you can usually tweak modern game graphics settings until you get a near High graphics setting experience with this Graphics card.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition in your PC? This Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition card has 12 to 18 months of latest AAA game play left in it before upgrading should be considered

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition? A good choice when looking to upgrade the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition would be the 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB which meets 898 of the 1000 top game’s recommended system requirements and has 51% better performance. An alternative great upgrade graphics card would be a R-500 Series Radeon RX 580 8GB, which has 21% better performance and can run 845 of the top 1000 demanding game requirements today.