Conclusion

First of all we have a quick chat about prices. These days an AMD Radeon R9 290 costs 285 Euro. Compare that to the 540 Euro you'd have to pay for the cheapest reference GTX 980 you can find and you’ll notice that the GTX 980 is about 90 percent more expensive.

To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in 3DMark graphics score where we see that the GTX 980 is 26 percent quicker in FireStrike Performance, 25 percent in Extreme and 19 percent when running FireStrike Ultra. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the GTX 980 is 11 percent quicker in 1080p, 12 percent when running 1440p and 16 percent using our 2160p preset. In the case of games it turns out that the performance differences highly depend on the resolution combined with level of detail. When running 1080p resolution we see that the GTX 980 is faster in all 13 games we have in our charts but not by much. One game that shows significant difference is GRID Autosport, where the GTX 980 is about 60 percent faster than the R9 290 in 1080p, 46 percent in 1440p and checking 2160p we find 68 percent difference. Having a closer look at Metro Last Light at 1080p shows 56 percent, 41 percent when 1440p and the GTX 980 is about 35 percent quicker in 2160. A closer look at Crysis 3 reveals a 52 percent gap in 1080p, 39 percent in 1440p and 64 percent in 2160p. Apart from that Far Cry 4 shows a big spike at UHD, where the difference is 103 percent. For most of  the other games the GTX 980 is about 35 percent ahead of the Radeon R9 290.

The only games we can't see a significant gap inbetween the two cards is Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel where the GTX 980 is about 5 to 12 percent quicker than R9 290, averaging all resolutions.

Overall the R9 290 isn't performing too bad, and there is no doubt that the R9 290 still packs some serious punch. Since it's rather clear that this particular card struggles running games smoothly at UHD resolution it was still interesting to see how the R9 290 stacks up against the GTX 980. Last but no least we also had a look at power consumption and we noticed that the test system with R9 290 burns 12 percent more power in idle and under load the difference is 43 percent.

If you’re thinking about changing from a R9 290 to a GTX 980 we can tell you that this only makes sense if you’re planning on playing games at ultra high resolutions. In all other scenarios the R9 290 is still a seriously quick graphics card and more than capable of pumping out high-enough frame rates, especially if you eye at 1080p. Apart from that you should also take into account that the GTX 980 is 90 percent more expensive than the R9 290 when we compare retail prices. Keep that in mind when you see that even at UHD the performance difference is roughly 37%. If you actually want to change from a Radeon R9 290 to a GTX 980 you can sell R9 290 cards these days for 180 to 200 Euro on Ebay (roughly the same in US-Dollar). Since a GTX 980 costs about 540 Euro these days, you'd still need to invest an additional 340 to 360 Euro for the on average 35% more frames per second.

Page 1 - Test Setup	Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 12 - GRID Autosport
Page 3 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel	Page 14 - Metro Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 4	Page 15 - Assassin's Creed Unity
Page 6 - Watch Dogs	Page 16 - Far Cry 4
Page 7 - Tomb Raider	Page 17 - Consommation
Page 8 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 6 - Prix
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Indice de performance jeux
Page 10 - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare	Page 20 - Conclusion