15 Sep 2020 - 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 2020 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 148 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 Microsoft Flight Simulator and saw it deliver playable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 95 FPS, Medium: 75 FPS, High: 50 FPS and Ultra: 36 FPS. We proceeded to look at Horizon: Zero Dawn to see how that compared and saw that it returned a playable 44 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 Microsoft Flight Simulator which yielded a playable performance. Its FPS results for the graphics settings are as follows - L: 72FPS, M: 57FPS, H: 38FPS, U: 27FPS. Another popular game we tested with this card was Horizon: Zero Dawn and that was playable. This graphics card delivered 33 FPS at Ultra 1440p. Another popular title was Mafia: Definitive Edition which is predicted to get weak results with a 8FPS on Ultra 1440p. Gaming at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition is not going to be able to keep stable frame rates at all times at Ultra 1440p on modern games.

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? Its time to start researching your next graphics card upgrade as the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor OC Edition is failing to meet modern day gaming system requirements. A gpu AAA lifespan of around 6-12 months.

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 Super 6GB which meets 833 of the 1000 top game’s recommended system requirements and has 49% 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 769 of the top 1000 demanding game requirements today.