Sapphire's Vapor-X R9 290X 8GB: The More, The Merrier?

[Musaab]

More weight for a sinking ship. Extra GBs of memory and some extra 100s of U$D.
Buy OC 980 for less money and more performance.

 

[Nuckles_56]

For those of you who have been crying out for crossfire and SLI testing, here you go http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/zardon/sapphire-r9-290x-vapor-x-8gb-cf-review/

 

[piklar]

"The card's BIOS allows for an impressive 50% increase in the power target, by the way"

Then surely a good portion o the cards value lies in its overclocking ability? Why was this not explored? Seriously anyone buying this card would want to squeeze as much stable performance possible out if it since that's what its designed for. Makes this article incomplete tbh..

 

[cleeve]

"Sapphire isn't traditionally considered a premium brand..."

Don - You really can't make that statement without qualifying it. Gimmick LED lights and shiny magnesium alloy shrouds don't make a card "premium". Are you saying that Sapphire hasn't "traditionally" delivered high-performance and efficient cooling in their cards? Can you please explain your statement in more detail? Thanks!

I mean that Sapphire's cards tend to be on the lower end of the price spectrum compared to stuff like ASUS' ROG.

Please don't read more into it than a comment on market positioning. I usually associate Sapphire with excellent performing graphics cards with less frills (i.e. no backplate) but that cost less.

 

[fw1374]

I think we need to wait for badly optimized games ported from next-gen consoles to see the real difference. These games hardly matter now.

 

[anthony8989]

Haha so true ^

 

[palladin9479]

The test methodology was extremely flawed due to it being based on the premise that frame buffer resolution is what determines memory usage on dGPU's, this is false. Frame buffer size (aka screen resolution) was important back when we had 8and 16MB graphics cards, it's no longer relevant due to card sizing being ridiculous. Most graphics memory is being used by the drivers for managing texture resources and processing. The big memory eaters are AA and AF as those are applied to each stored texture with the exactly of FSAA which is applied to the screen frame buffer itself. FSAA is so expensive processing wise that you won't be doing it bigger then 4x and so it won't be a huge memory hog. SSAA, MSAA and the other various flavors of selective AA do their magic on the textures instead and store the aliased texture inside memory, the more textures you have the more storage is needed for aliased data. You can have many times more texture data then what is actually present on the screen and so the graphics drivers store all that inside the GPU's memory for quick access locally.

Now as to why you see so little memory usage, it's the limiter of the 32 bit NT kernel and the 2GB application memory space. Games are very careful with texture data because they don't want to exceed the application space limit, this results in the game under utilizing the GPU's memory. This will change once games and their associated engines are designed and compiled for 64 bit exclusively with zero concerns giving for the 32 bit compatibility and conservation of virtual address space.

 

[soldier45]

Waiting on a better 8gb Nvidia card. Wouldn't lower myself to get a AMD. 4K display for Christmas for myself.

 

[Janithdalw]

what about 2560x1440? is there any difference?

I guess it will render more FPS than the 4K resolution. That's the only difference it would get.

 

[heero yuy]

no crossfire test

how the hell are you supposed to see if the extra ram did anything without doing a 4K crossfire test? its where it is allegedly supposed to do the most

and how the hell are sapphire not a premium brand? they have the best coolers out there

 

[ohim]

Sapphire isn't traditionally considered a premium brand

Is the author new or crazy ? I had in the past E-VGA GTX 760 SC ACX and now the Sapphire 290 OC Vapor-X 4GB. The build quality is above what E-VGA had to offer. As for the topic at hand the card is not ment for single GPU use, is for CF setups that want to push the resolution/details envelope, we all know that 2 GPUs in SLI/CF need double the RAM to be effective at high resolutions, that`s the point of the 8 GB. And i`m amazed you included Alien Isolation... the game is new but it is nowhere demanding. Crysis 3 might be old but that game knows how to put your hardware to it`s knees.... Do a Crysis 3 CF maxed out test between 4 and 8 GB.

 

[cleeve]

Error on the page 3 BF4 4K tests: it looks like you've swapped the labels for reference 290X and 970.

Speaking of the reference 290X, did you not have an aftermarket 4GB 290X available? If the idea is to isolate variables, why not get a 290X that wouldn't be hampered by poor cooling? Seems to me that would have been the better comparison.

And I too don't understand what you mean by Sapphire not being traditionally a premium brand. Tom's has given numerous awards to their cards in the past and the Vapor-X cooler has long been one of the best on the market.

And I have to agree with others here that 1440 and XFire tests would have been very appropriate for this card.

I'm not trying to tear you down, Don. I regularly enjoy your writing. I think you just missed the mark a little on this one.

- BF3 4K tests: actually, it was the copy that was incorrect. Fixed

- I actually didn't have an aftermarket 290X available, unfortunately

- The Sapphire 'premium brand' thing I explained in a post above, but I agree I never got the point across clearly in the article and just removed the comment.

- CrossFire: I can only test what i was sent. Sapphire tried to send me two but availability is very low, so they were unable to.

 

[zakaron]

My take-away from this article is that single GPU setups just aren't ready for full out 4K gaming. Give AMD and Nvidia a couple more generations to improve and then we'll see 60+ fps @ 4K. By then, 8GB vram will be the norm. It is kind of funny to think that a video card has double the RAM than my current PC bucket.

Another stand-out in this article is the cooler. I give Sapphire a thumbs up on this one!

 

[skit75]

They are who we thought they were.... a bunch of bad ports asking for more hardware that they cannot convert to meaningful performance. And so the great VRAM money grab continues, despite comparisons showing otherwise. Optimize your ports.

 

[mamasan2000]

"Sapphire isn't traditionally considered a premium brand..."

Don - You really can't make that statement without qualifying it. Gimmick LED lights and shiny magnesium alloy shrouds don't make a card "premium". Are you saying that Sapphire hasn't "traditionally" delivered high-performance and efficient cooling in their cards? Can you please explain your statement in more detail? Thanks!

Ten years ago I would have agreed with the reviewer. Sapphire had consistently cheaper ATI-cards. And performance was a bit less than other brands IIRC.

 

[n00dl3]

That gtx 970 is looking better and better.... hoping amd comes out with something better for competition sake.

 

[mlga91]

Still not enough to run watch dogs. God dammit ubisoft, what do you want for us?

 

[photonboy]

CROSSFIRE:

Crossfire (or SLI) is just going to increase the frame rate. It's not critical to run Crossfire tests to extrapolate the data wanted in this particular set of tests. In fact, it would have complicated things even further.

If testing shows a game tends to scale with 2xCrossfire with 70% efficiency then just take the 30FPS for a single card and assume just over 52FPS with two in Crossfire.

If an R9-290X 8GB and 4GB variat gets the same frame rate for single cards then they will get the SAME frame rate in Crossfire.

So again, Crossfire testing is nice but it goes beyond the main point of the article and we can extrapolate based on previously done scaling tests.

 

[youssef 2010]

I've lost my liking for Nvidia ever since they decided to disable PhysX on systems containing AMD GPUs. But I'll always prefer buying a newer GPU to an older one with more memory. AMD still has no answer for the GTX980. If I was buying a new GPU today, I'd go for the 980, unfortunately. I hope AMD has a trick up its sleeve.

 

[Davil]

Stop reviewing the same graphics cards with different coolers. It would be great if there was an article or 2 about the new generation of GTX's.

 

[wtfxxxgp]

I fee some of you missed the real story: Just how great that GTX 970 is! Seriously, the 8GB is 5% faster than a 4GB at 4k res. At normal HD res, the 8GB card is blown away by a 4GB card. GTX 970 FTW

 

[RedJaron]

CROSSFIRE:

Crossfire (or SLI) is just going to increase the frame rate. It's not critical to run Crossfire tests to extrapolate the data wanted in this particular set of tests. In fact, it would have complicated things even further.

If testing shows a game tends to scale with 2xCrossfire with 70% efficiency then just take the 30FPS for a single card and assume just over 52FPS with two in Crossfire.

If an R9-290X 8GB and 4GB variat gets the same frame rate for single cards then they will get the SAME frame rate in Crossfire.

So again, Crossfire testing is nice but it goes beyond the main point of the article and we can extrapolate based on previously done scaling tests.

That's not true because the VRAM has to be mirrored across each card so not all GPU resources scale with the XFire. It's no surprise that a single 8GB card performs almost identical to a single 4GB card. At lower settings the VRAM isn't necessary and at higher settings the GPU chip becomes the bottleneck before you're limited by VRAM capacity. Adding the second card means you get extra processing power to use the extended VRAM.

 

[Sky_2]

Does any of you knows if a 8 GB GTX 970 is in the works?
Looks like it would be the perfect card for 4k gaming (especially if they manage to only charge a 50-60$ ish premium for it)

 

[Roger Rogers-1382392]

8Gb 970?
http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-to-reveal-geforce-gtx-970980-with-8gb-of-memory-in-november-of-december/

Dude PC Mag;
Dont cheese me off. I just bought two x 3Gb ASUS R9 280 cards for my back-up gaming rig; has a 3DMark 9690 Firestrike result. .... http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/3200456/fs/3202281
So; any 8Gb card is three years from me now.
Maybe it will be the price I paid for these by then... $430 the pair.

 

[Brunostako]

Now do a comparison of 2 x R9 290X 8GB vs 2 x GTX 970.