10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X 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.

This PC hardware performance game review for the Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition graphics card, when running 2023 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. 375 games can be played by this graphics card of the 1000 most demanding games being played by PC gamers today.

The Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition graphics card is returning a playable performance on Back 4 Blood at 1080p of 39 frames per second at Ultra graphics settings. Another popular title that is good to benchmark graphics cards against is Far Cry 6 which we saw got weak frame rates of 18 FPS. A third game we can look at on Ultra at 1080p is the popular Resident Evil 8, which was getting 16 FPS under tests.

With PC gamers looking for larger screen sizes like 1440p we tested the Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition by playing Back 4 Blood which yielded a playable performance. Its FPS results for the graphics settings are as follows - L: 79FPS, M: 62FPS, H: 42FPS, U: 30FPS. Another popular game we tested with this card was Far Cry 6 and that was weak. This graphics card delivered 14 FPS at Ultra 1440p. Another popular title was Resident Evil 8 which gets weak results with a 12FPS on Ultra 1440p. Running games at 1440p with a Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition is likely in need of some graphical option tweaks when trying to play modern games.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290X Gigabyte WindForce 3X 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 Gigabyte WindForce 3X 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 Gigabyte WindForce 3X OC Edition.