10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning 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 is a quick game performance synopsis for the AAA games played in 2022. In particular we focus on how well the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition runs at Ultra graphics settings and what frames per second it is getting at 1080p, 1440p and 4K monitor resolutions. This card runs recommended graphics requirements of 392 games from the top 1000 most demanding games being played today.

A Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition card at 1080p is seeing a reasonable frame rate when running Days Gone on Ultra - 48 FPS. Lets look at the performance its getting on Resident Evil 8 which is 17 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 52 FPS.

Increasing resolution to 1440p is something a number of PC gamers are doing today. We tested the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition at 1440p with Days Gone, which got a playable set of FPS results. These were, Low: 96 FPS, Medium: 75 FPS, High: 51 FPS and Ultra: 36 FPS. We then checked out Resident Evil 8 which had a set of graphics results as followed, L: 34FPS, M: 27FPS, H: 18FPS, U: 13FPS. And another popular game was Star Citizen with predictions of L: 104FPS, M: 82FPS, H: 55FPS, U: 39FPS at 1440p. Gaming at 1440p with the Radeon R9 290X MSI Lightning Edition is a suitable graphics card for this larger screen res. In some cases we might expect some graphics option tweaks down from Ultra to High to help improve FPS stability when gaming at 1440p.

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? 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 Lightning 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 MSI Lightning Edition.