10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC 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.

We take a look at game performance achieved on this graphics card when running 2023 popular games. This short Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition game hardware review looks at the graphics card frame rate performance on Ultra graphics settings at 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions. The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition can run the recommended graphics system requirements for 362 games today, of the top 1000 most demanding.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Days Gone and saw it deliver reasonable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 117 FPS, Medium: 93 FPS, High: 62 FPS and Ultra: 45 FPS. We proceeded to look at Star Citizen to see how that compared and predict that it will return a reasonable 45 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

As the PC gaming masses explore larger screen resolutions we decided to run some game checks at 1440p across a few popular games. We discovered the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition ran Days Gone to a playable performance level. Results across the graphics settings looked like this, Low: 90 FPS, Medium: 71 FPS, High: 48 FPS and Ultra: 34 FPS. Another game researched was Star Citizen with predictions of L: 90FPS, M: 71FPS, H: 48FPS, U: 34FPS. And then we checked graphics card performance on Back 4 Blood, which returned L: 75FPS, M: 59FPS, H: 40FPS, U: 28FPS at 1440p. 1440p gaming on the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition is a reasonable choice for most modern games at 1440p, but you may encounter some need to adjust graphics settings down from Ultra to High in some cases to improve gaming stability.

How many years will the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition in your PC? This Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition card has 12 to 18 months of latest AAA game play left in it before upgrading should be considered

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC 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 20% better and can run 716 of today’s 1000 most demanding PC games. Alternatively a good choice when looking to upgrade the Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Vapor-X OC Edition would be the R-500 Series Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB which meets 956 of the 1000 top game’s recommended system requirements and has 69% better performance.