AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review

[DaNGeROuS KiLLeR]

"In a Class of Its Own"

This is the marketing slogan that AMD keeps feeding us. Over and over, the company tells us just how great it is to game at 4K using a small form factor platform. Believe us AMD, we know. The Tom's Hardware audience certainly appreciates the technical acumen that goes into generating big frame rates in compact enclosures.

 

We're certainly not surprised to see AMD emphasize the highest resolutions with its newest products. As far back as last year’s FirePro W8100 and W9100, AMD declared high-res 3D to be the killer feature distinguishing it from the competition. The thought process was fairly simple. If you can't beat the other team in a straight-up battle, find a way around them.

 

 

So what does all of that have to do with the launch of AMD's Radeon R9 Nano? As we saw in theory when we teased the Fiji GPUs, and then in practice when we reviewed the Fury X, the graphics processor's design shines particularly at high resolutions.

 

And it’s easy to explain why: a quick look at the Fiji block diagram illustrates the chip's four shader engines, similar to Hawaii's configuration. Each has its own geometry processor and rasterizer, as well as four render back ends that can process up to 16 pixels per clock each. Fiji distinguishes itself by increasing the number of compute units (CUs) per shader unit from 11 to 16. With 64 shaders per CU, each engine ends up with 1024 shaders, or 4096 shaders total. AMD stuck with four texture filter units per CU, which means that there’s a total of 256 per shader engine, as opposed to Hawaii’s 176.

 

 

Perhaps you're wondering if the lack of change in the front end bottlenecks the back? We got our answer back when we reviewed the Radeon R9 Fury X. That's why Fiji fares better at high resolutions, but runs into trouble against the competition at Full HD.

The Form Factor as the Next Big Thing?

With our guesses as to AMD's newly-discovered focus on Ultra HD out of the way, we turn to the company's most recent obsession: compact high-end graphics cards for the mini-ITX form factor. There’s no real competition in this space. The nearest threat is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 Mini, which has trouble with high resolutions due to its memory subsystem.

 

If there’s one thing that Nvidia and its board partners have completely missed, it’s high-end graphics designed for small PCs (though that doesn't stop companies like Falcon Northwest from dropping GeForce GTX 980 Tis into mini-ITX builds). The HBM that AMD takes advantage of on its single-GPU flagship is also a boon for the Radeon R9 Nano. Still, the GeForce GTX 970 Mini shows us that a small card from Nvidia isn't out of the question, even if GDDR5 makes layout more of a challenge.

 

 

Without a diminutive 980 variant planned (that we know of), the gap in Nvidia’s line-up is exactly what AMD wants to capitalize on, delivering high performance at demanding settings without generating a ton of heat. As it turns out, AMD's Radeon R9 Nano is a great piece of hardware; there's really nothing like it out there. That’s probably why AMD is setting its price at an eye-popping $649.

 

A lack of competition shapes our testing. Really, we're forced to narrow our focus to the Radeon R9 Nano versus Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 Mini, which is close in size but not as fast.