Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Tri-X OC Video Card Review

By Steven Kean

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven DX11 Benchmark is Back with Version 3.0

Unigine Heaven benchmark was first released in October 2009, it is now on the fourth generation of the benchmark. It is a benchmark that tests DirectX 11, the scores provided are 100% based on the GPUs performance. Like most benchmarks, it has presets that can be customized for a specific test. These presets makes it easy to get a good comparison of the results. In addition to providing the FPS it also monitors the GPU temperature and clock; however that we will not be concerned with at this time. With Heavens presets being able to adjusted, they were set to the Ultra quality, Tesselation to Extreme and Anti-aliasing to x8.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Heaven 1080p FPS

The Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 received an average 52.7 FPS when ran at 1080p. This is a 22.1 FPS faster than the R7950, a nearly 72% performance increase in the Heaven benchmark.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Heaven 1080p Overall

Overall score for Heaven reflects the huge performance boost over the R7950, with another 72% performance increase.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Heaven Eyefinity FPS

While at 1080p the difference was 72%, at 5760×1080 (in Eyefinity mode), the difference between the R7950 and the R9 290 shrunk to 32%.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Heaven Eyefinity Overall

Once again the FPS difference is reflected in the Overall score for the Heaven benchmark with a 32.6% difference in performance.

Benchmark Results: Heaven showed a huge difference in performance for with the R9 290 when we compared it to the R7950. At 1080p a 72% performance difference, while in Eyefinity mode (5760×1080) it was a 32% performance increase. Either way, Heaven shows that the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 is a worthy upgrade if you are running a R7950 or below.