AMD Radeon R9 Nano 4GB Review

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.

The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).

We set all of GTA V's settings to their highest levels for both resolutions but made sure to disable the performance-crippling MSAA settings. We saw the game use almost 4GB of VRAM at 2560×1440 and around 4.5GB at 4K (where possible with the relevant video cards). The built-in benchmark is used to gather performance data.

Performance data from the AMD R9 295X2 unfortunately could not make it into the charts as the card has a bug with our test monitor that prevents GTA V's benchmark from operating.

GTA V shows a preference towards Nvidia's hardware at 2560×1440. The Asus GTX 980 STRIX leapfrogs the R9 Nano, which now sits above the factory-overclocked R9 390X. A frame rate of almost 60 FPS means that the stock-clocked R9 Nano will deliver an enjoyable gaming experience in GTA V while using the 1440P resolution and Very High image settings.

4K sees the Fiji-based R9 Nano outperforming the GTX 980. Given that these GTA V settings and the 4K resolution will happily use more than 4.5GB of VRAM, the R9 Nano seems to be enjoying some of the same benefits that the Fury X saw thanks to its high-bandwidth memory. GTA V seems to be allowing the 4GB frame buffer to use its speed as a way of alleviating the higher VRAM usage that other graphics cards were hit with.

GTA V was one of the more positive game engines when it comes to allowing the R9 Nano's GPU core clock to flex its speed. At 1440P the R9 Nano was able to hit its 1GHz maximum core clock and the average reading was in the high-900MHz range. 4K also saw the card run at an average core clock of more than 900MHz.

The overclocked R9 Nano configuration saw a healthy performance gain at 4K. The average GPU core clock speed sat a little over the 1GHz mark, although this came at the price of a noticeably higher fan speed increasing noise output.

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