2 Aug 2020 - Graphics card reviewed

Gamers upgrading will be considering the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB 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. All games with system requirements of DirectX 11 or lower are met by this card.

What FPS performance can the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition get on latest AAA 2020 games? In particular our game review looks at the FPS achieved running on Ultra graphics settings on the 1080p screen resolution as well as 1440p and 4K. This graphics hardware can run 385 of the 1000 most demanding PC games played today.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Grounded and saw it deliver reasonable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 153 FPS, Medium: 121 FPS, High: 81 FPS and Ultra: 58 FPS. We proceeded to look at Horizon: Zero Dawn to see how that compared and saw that it returned a reasonable 48 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

One of the growing popular screen resolutions for PC gaming is the wider 1440p. So we wanted to see how well the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition performed at 1440p by taking a look at some of the current popular games. First we looked at Grounded and saw it deliver playable frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 117 FPS, Medium: 92 FPS, High: 62 FPS and Ultra: 44 FPS. We then checked the performance on Horizon: Zero Dawn to see if that runs well. It was playable with a 37 FPS at Ultra 1440p. In summary we feel the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition running at 1440p 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 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB Edition in your PC? Our current calculations suggest a graphics card upgrade will be required in around 12-18 months

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 290X Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC 4GB 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 37% better and can run 853 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 47% more powerful. This upgrade choice can also run 945 games from the most demanding games today.