Review: AMD Sapphire Tri-X R9 290

Benchmarks – Thief

Settings:  DirectX 11, Mantle, Texture Quality (Very High), Shadow Quality (Very High), DOF (High), Texture Filtering Quality (8x Anisotropic), SSAA (High/Off), Automatically Limit Texture Quality (Default), Screenspace Reflection, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, FXAA (On/Off), Contact Hardening Shadows, Tessellation, Image-based Reflection

Thief is just one of the latest games to use AMD’s Mantle, a low-level graphics rendering API that allows developers to speak more directly to the GPU rather than having to go through and be bottlenecked by the CPU. The freed resources should enable for smoother experience.

MSI Lightning GeForce GTX 680

Sapphire Tri-X OC R9 290

Mantle

Both were able to run Thief with all the bells and whistles without dipping below 30 frames per second, but enabling Mantle really showed the differences between cards and APIs. In fact, I managed to get almost 30 frames over DirectX 11 for the average by disabling the more expensive supersample anti-aliasing. If you want to make the most out of a 120 Hz or higher display, Mantle is definitely a boon.