Performance: Test Setup

AMD speaks of performance improvements in addition to those image-quality enhancing features. One of its more colorful slides speaks of "up to 19 percent performance improvements," which should have you raise your eyebrows; that is, until you spot the fineprint, which reads "since launch driver." Our hearts go out those who haven't updated their AMD graphics driver over the past year.



We put these drivers through a quick spin on our reference Radeon R9 290 graphics card, with 3DMark 11, 3DMark Firestrike, Sniper Elite III, Battlefield 4, and Ryse: Son of Rome. Battlefield 4 runs DICE's latest Frostbite engine, while Ryse: Son of Rome runs the latest CryEngine from CryTek. All three games are set to run in DirectX 11 mode. We compared AMD's Catalyst 14.12 Omega to its immediate predecessor, the Catalyst 14.11.2 beta, because someone still running Catalyst 13.12 is an unlikely occurrence (it makes games such as Battlefield 4 with the post-Mantle update and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare unplayable).

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.