10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition graphics card is considered budget with poor modern game performance when playing anything more demanding than indie game requirements.

Capable of running games with up to a DirectX 11 requirement.

Game performance for the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition where we look at the bigger games played in 2022. Looking closely at the graphics card frame rate performance on Ultra graphics settings at 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions. In comparison to the game recommended requirements of the 1000 most demanding games played today this PC hardware can run 367.

A Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition card at 1080p is seeing a weak frame rate when running Resident Evil 8 on Ultra - 13 FPS. Lets look at the performance its getting on Battlefield 2042 which is 4 FPS. To add a bit more variety lets see how the popular Star Citizen is predicted to perform on this hardware, which gets a reasonable 49 FPS.

Moving screen sizes up to 1440p we ran Resident Evil 8 on the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition to see that it got a weak set of frame rates. Here are the low to ultra results at 1440p - L: 25FPS, M: 20FPS, H: 13FPS, U: 10FPS. Another popular game to test at 1440p with this card was Battlefield 2042 which seemed weak in performance netting an Ultra FPS of 3 FPS. Finally we then took a look at Star Citizen where its predicted Ultra 1440p Frame rates were playable at 37 FPS. After a look at the popular games running at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition, this is likely in need of some graphical option tweaks when trying to play modern games.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ 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 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition? A suitable upgrade choice for the Radeon R9 290 PowerColor PCS+ Edition is the RX 5000 Series Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB, which is 20% more powerful and can run 726 of the 1000 most demanding PC games beating their recommended requirements. Alternatively we would suggest getting a R-500 Series Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB, as it can run 960 of the top 1000 demanding game requirements today with 69% increased graphics performance.