2 Aug 2020 - Graphics card reviewed

While some games have more powerful requirements than this GPU, the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X 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.

Here is a quick game performance synopsis for the AAA games played in 2020. In particular we focus on how well the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition runs at Ultra graphics settings and what frames per second it is getting at 1080p, 1440p and 4K monitor resolutions. 192 games can be played by this graphics card of the 1000 most demanding games being played by PC gamers today.

The 1080p FPS on Ultra for the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition shows us that Assassins Creed: Valhalla is predicted to get a weak result of 15 FPS, and then we are seeing Halo Infinite predicted to return a weak 22 FPS while another game on our list is the Microsoft Flight Simulator which is predicted to get 36 frames per second at Ultra 1080p.

Next up we increase screen res tests to accommodate the growing in popularity 1440p screen size. So we researched the upcoming Halo Infinite to predict how the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition would deal with it. Our research revealed a weak series of FPS results across these graphics presets - Low: 43 FPS, Medium: 34 FPS, High: 23 FPS and Ultra: 16 FPS. Next we looked at Microsoft Flight Simulator which we predict will be playable with a 27 FPS at Ultra 1440p. And finally looked at Assassins Creed: Valhalla that we predict will get an Ultra 1440p FPS of 11. Looking at a few of these 1440p results for the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition we get the impression that it is likely in need of some graphical option tweaks when trying to play modern games.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition in your PC? We think this Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition has around 6-12 months until an upgrade should be considered.

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition? A good choice when looking to upgrade the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition would be the 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB which meets 853 of the 1000 top game’s recommended system requirements and has 47% better performance. Alternatively a good upgrade choice for this graphics card today would be the R-500 Series Radeon RX 580 8GB. For comparison of the 1000 most demanding games around today this suggested upgrade is 20% better and can meet 790 of their recommended requirements.