10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition graphics card is considered budget with poor modern game performance when playing anything more demanding than indie game requirements.

All games with system requirements of DirectX 11 or lower are met by this card.

Here we take a closer look at the various performances across 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions for the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition. In particular this is looking at the Ultra graphics settings to see what sort of FPS this graphics card can get across some of the more popular games played in 2023. In comparison to the game recommended requirements of the 1000 most demanding games played today this PC hardware can run 386.

The 1080p FPS on Ultra for the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition shows us that Resident Evil 8 is getting a weak result of 17 FPS, and then we are seeing Days Gone returning a reasonable 47 FPS while another game on our list is the Back 4 Blood which is getting 40 frames per second at Ultra 1080p.

Moving screen sizes up to 1440p we ran Days Gone on the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition to see that it got a playable set of frame rates. Here are the low to ultra results at 1440p - L: 95FPS, M: 75FPS, H: 50FPS, U: 36FPS. Another popular game to test at 1440p with this card was Back 4 Blood which seemed playable in performance netting an Ultra FPS of 30 FPS. Finally we then took a look at Resident Evil 8 where its Ultra 1440p Frame rates were weak at 13 FPS. Getting popular modern games to run at 1440p on the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition 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? There are no graphics cards on the current market that would provide a big enough increase in performance to warrant upgrading the Radeon R9 290X Asus DirectCU II OC Edition.