15 Sep 2020 - Graphics card reviewed

While some games have more powerful requirements than this GPU, the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming Edition is only really challenged by the most demanding games released today, but normally it is more than capable of running games with a stable frame rate at 1080p. All games with system requirements of DirectX 11 or lower are met by this card.

What FPS performance can the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming Edition get on latest AAA 2020 games? In particular our game review looks at the FPS achieved running on Ultra graphics settings on the 1080p screen resolution as well as 1440p and 4K. Of the 1000 most demanding recommended specs found in game requirements today, this gpu is more powerful than the graphics requirement of 284 games in todays list.

Looking at some of the modern popular games people are playing today the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming Edition is predicted to run Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War with playable performances on 1080p Ultra, getting 39 frames per second. Comparing this to Horizon: Zero Dawn which is getting reasonable results, where it averages 47 FPS. Another popular game we looked at is Cyberpunk 2077, which is predicted to run at 44 frames per second.

As the PC gaming masses explore larger screen resolutions we decided to run some game checks at 1440p across a few popular games. We predict the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming Edition will run the upcoming game Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War to a playable performance level. Predictions across the graphics settings looked like this, Low: 79 FPS, Medium: 62 FPS, High: 42 FPS and Ultra: 30 FPS. Another game tested was Horizon: Zero Dawn, L: 94FPS, M: 74FPS, H: 50FPS, U: 35FPS. And then we researched potential graphics card performance on Cyberpunk 2077, wih estimates revealing L: 89FPS, M: 70FPS, H: 47FPS, U: 34FPS at 1440p. After a look at the popular games running at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming Edition, this 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 MSI Gaming Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290X MSI Gaming 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 MSI Gaming Edition? A great upgrade graphics card would be a 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB, which has 41% better performance and can run 832 of the top 1000 demanding game requirements today. Alternatively if you are thinking of upgrading this graphics card then we would currently suggest the R-500 Series Radeon RX 590 8GB. This PC hardware upgrade performs 22% better and can run 785 of today’s 1000 most demanding PC games.