The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Like the other Fiji cards, AMD is promoting the R9 Nano in part on its 4K capabilities. And while we disagree that this card is suitable for 4K gaming based on its sub-Fury performance, we’re including 4K results anyhow to serve as a point of comparison.
In any case Battlefield 4 is often a good indicator of general card performance, and for the R9 Nano this is no exception. What we find is that the R9 Nano trails the other Fury cards in all cases. However to our initial surprise, the R9 Nano sticks rather close to the R9 Fury. The petite powerhouse trails the R9 Fury by only 1-6%, which for the record is a smaller gap than we were expecting.
While the R9 Nano packs a full Fiji GPU, AMD has to pull back on clockspeeds to hit their power targets; in the case of Battlefield 4 this is an average clockspeed of just 879MHz at 2560x1440. Given this we had been expecting the R9 Nano to deliver around 85-90% of the performance of the R9 Fury (and about 80% of the R9 Fury X), based on the assumption that average clockspeeds would be closer to 800MHz. So the fact that the R9 Nano starts off as close to the R9 Fury as it does – even if it’s still trailing it – is a pleasant surprise.
Otherwise with performance still clearly occupying a position as a “3rd tier” Fiji card, I’m not sure if anything about these results should be surprising. On a price/performance basis AMD is not intending to be competitive with other $650 cards, so the R9 Fury X and GTX 980 Ti are of course on the top of the heap. What you get instead is a card that delivers around 90% of R9 Fury X’s performance in BF4 with much less power consumption.
Moving on, compared to the lower power and smaller cards, the R9 Nano is as expected a clean sweep. Demonstrating the virtues of a wide and lower clocked processor’s ability to deliver strong performance without requiring extreme power, everything from the R9 285 to the GTX 980 trails the R9 Nano here. Compared to the GTX 970 Mini in particular, the R9 Nano is 12-26% faster depending on the resolution.
The one potential problem here for the R9 Nano is the GTX 980. Though not a Mini-ITX card, the GTX 980’s power consumption is going to be fairly close to the R9 Nano’s, definitely more so than GTX 970’s. From a power efficiency standpoint it’s the GTX 980 that poses the greatest challenge to the R9 Nano, and while it’s ahead of the GTX 980 in this case at 2560x1440 and higher, it’s a sign that AMD should be worried about what could happen if an NVIDIA partner produced a Mini-ITX GTX 980.
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wperry - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Man, going by the comments, there's piss in many a bowls of Cheerios this morning.DanNeely - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
For anyone who doesn't know what's going on, HardOCP put out a good writeup yesterday.http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/09/amd_roy_...
TLDR version: A senior AMD manager said some really stupid stuff on twitter.
palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Shocker, Kyle at HardOCP is butthurt....pt2501 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
After reading the commentary at HardOCP, I generally agree with the senior AMD manager. Nothing he said insinuated that HardOCP was an unfair site, what was said is that HardOCPs focus is for top performance especially overclocking performance. Fury Nano designed to fill a niche for a small but high performance build. We all know the ongoing supply issues exist with Fiji and if you have limited supply you must choose where cards go that produce no income or customer satisfaction or else it will be ANOTHER PAPER launch. The reviewer began his argument by bitching about paper launches on the first page when this limited sample reviews might be designed to mitigate this situation.He complains about AMD only wanting things painted in a favorable light but he illustrates that his is willing to remove content that he finds unfavorable when THE REVIEWER THEN REMOVED A FORUM POST OF A CUSTOM FURY NANO BECAUSE IT WAS NOT IN LINE WITH THE SITE'S FOCUS. Bottom line when this guy even admits he is an asshole. I just cannot accept people taking this reviewer and by extension HardOCPs butthurt attitude about being excluded. The AMD manager didn't even mention HardOCP, his posts where in response to other sites. HardOCP just assumed that this extended to them.
As a reference Anandtech has never been an enthusiastic fan of AMDs' cards since the 9700 pro. Yet AMD and Nvidia have NEVER failed to give them a card to review. Doesn't this seem to speak more about the authenticity and reputation of the review site? While I am wary of venders choosing who gets cards to review, with a product as difficult as the Fiji cards to keep up with demand I more than understand their desire to get cards into people computers. AMD knows these are niche cards but at least they want these cards to get make them money, which AMD needs.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
That site is so amateurish. They didn't even include a single objective noise measurement in power supply reviews.lmcd - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
I didn't realize HardOCP was more than a forum...at80eighty - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
lmfao @ Kyle. his tears are practically soaking my screen.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Thanks for the great review. I think the benchmarks ultimately end up underscoring how much graphics power it currently takes to run games at 4k and certainly argues the case for lower resolutions when it comes to single-GPU situations. Even though the Nano is a much less wattage-absurd GPU, I personally think 175 watts is just too much to be reasonable. I like having warm feet in the winter, but when the CPU is happy with 65 watts, pairing up a graphics card with it that needs almost 3x that much power is frustratingly annoying.Communism - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Take a Fury X, remove some VRMs, remove the closed loop water cooler, set Powertune to -50%, lower voltages a bit.Then sell at the same goddamned price as Fury X with a horrible open air cooler that would be a bad idea in any case that wouldn't be able to fit a Fury X to start with.
Fanboy milking at it's finest.
Asomething - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I partially agree with this, they should have dropped the price, though you are hating on the cooler a bit too much. its keeping in line with the 970 mini's cooler for noise/temps while cooling a hotter card, the cooler exhausts half out the case and half into the the case which is a hell of alot better than the 970 mini which exhausts in all directions (which is about 75% in the case and the rest out the back).