10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming 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.

Here we take a closer look at the various performances across 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions for the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming 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. 301 games can be played by this graphics card of the 1000 most demanding games being played by PC gamers today.

Now onto the frame rates achieved at 1080p. We are seeing Battlefield 2042 getting 3 FPS with the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming Edition, FIFA 22 getting 84 FPS and Dying Light 2 getting 22 frames per second. All run on Ultra at 1920x1080 screen res.

People are turning their increasingly more powerful graphics cards to the popular 1440p screen size so we tested the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming Edition to see how it performs on 1440p. First off we have looked at Battlefield 2042 where it was weak. The frame rates it scored for the game presets were - Low: 5 FPS, Medium: 4 FPS, High: 3 FPS and Ultra: 2 FPS. We added FIFA 22 to our tests and saw it was good with a 64 FPS at Ultra 1440p. And then tested Dying Light 2 which got 16 FPS at Ultra 1440p. After a look at the popular games running at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming Edition, this is not a bad choice for a larger screen size like this. Some games will struggle though, but with some careful graphic option adjustments in-game you can normally find a suitable visual experience with this GPU at 1440p.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290 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 290 MSI Gaming Edition? If you are thinking of upgrading this graphics card then we would currently suggest the RX 5000 Series Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB. This PC hardware upgrade performs 21% better and can run 716 of today’s 1000 most demanding PC games. Alternatively a suitable upgrade choice for the Radeon R9 290 MSI Gaming Edition is the R-500 Series Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB, which is 71% more powerful and can run 956 of the 1000 most demanding PC games beating their recommended requirements.