Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB Review

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test at 2560×1440 with quality setting at ULTRA, Tessellation at NORMAL, and Anti-Aliasing at x2.


AMD has always lagged behind Nvidia in regards to outright Tessellation performance however we can see the newer cards are performing a little better. The Palit GTX970 is outperformed by the Sapphire R9 390 Nitro, even before we overclock it. When overclocked the R9 290 Nitro manages to outperform the reference clocked R9 390X Tri-X. The Asus GTX980 Strix is still some way ahead of both Sapphire solutions, as we would expect considering the price differential.

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