2 Aug 2020 - Graphics card reviewed

While some games have more powerful requirements than this GPU, the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II 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.

This PC hardware performance game review for the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition graphics card, when running 2020 more popular games, lets us see what type of FPS this card gets when playing at 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions and ultra settings. This card runs recommended graphics requirements of 364 games from the top 1000 most demanding games being played today.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Horizon: Zero Dawn and saw it deliver reasonable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 124 FPS, Medium: 98 FPS, High: 66 FPS and Ultra: 47 FPS. We proceeded to look at Grounded to see how that compared and saw that it returned a reasonable 57 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

One of the growing popular screen resolutions for PC gaming is the wider 1440p. So we wanted to see how well the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition performed at 1440p by taking a look at some of the current popular games. First we looked at Horizon: Zero Dawn 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 then checked the performance on Grounded to see if that runs well. It was playable with a 43 FPS at Ultra 1440p. After a look at the popular games running at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition, this is a reasonable performance fit for this resolution. Some of the more resource intensive games may well need a few graphical tweak to get the most out of the graphics card at this increased resolution.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition in your PC? 12-18 months of top end gaming is still left in this graphics card

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition? A good choice when looking to upgrade the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition would be the 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB which meets 852 of the 1000 top game’s recommended system requirements and has 40% better performance. An alternative great upgrade graphics card would be a R-500 Series Radeon RX 590 8GB, which has 21% better performance and can run 804 of the top 1000 demanding game requirements today.