20 Feb 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

Gamers upgrading will be considering the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition graphics card as a serious price to performance entry point. This card will meet and play most demanding AAA games and do so with good graphics setting as standard, and confidently pushing past the recommended game system requirements needed to run today’s games. Capable of running games with up to a DirectX 11 requirement.

This PC hardware performance game review for the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition graphics card, when running 2021 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. The Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition can run the recommended graphics system requirements for 207 games today, of the top 1000 most demanding.

Running at 1080p this card gets a playable frame rate from Hitman 3 with 26 FPS on Ultra. Then we take a look at World of Warcraft: Shadowlands which returns a weak 20 FPS. Another title that we looked at is the popular Cyberpunk 2077 which we saw getting a playable 40 FPS.

We move on to 1440p, and tested Hitman 3 which delivered weak FPS results. Here are the graphic presets - Low: 52 FPS, Medium: 41 FPS, High: 28 FPS and Ultra: 20 FPS. Next we have World of Warcraft: Shadowlands running on Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition which gets L: 40FPS, M: 32FPS, H: 21FPS, U: 15FPS. And for performance contrast the popular Cyberpunk 2077 gets L: 81FPS, M: 63FPS, H: 43FPS, U: 31FPS at 1440p. 1440p Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition PC gaming is likely in need of some graphical option tweaks when trying to play modern games.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition in your PC? We think this Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition has around 6-12 months until an upgrade should be considered.

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition? If you are thinking of upgrading this graphics card then we would currently suggest the 16 Series GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB. This PC hardware upgrade performs 38% better and can run 800 of today’s 1000 most demanding PC games. Alternatively upgrading this graphics card would have us consider the R-500 Series Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB which is 48% more powerful. This upgrade choice can also run 908 games from the most demanding games today.