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

By Steven Kean

Crysis 3

EA Releases Crysis 3: 7 Wonders Episode 3 Cause and Effect Reverse Time Teaser Video

Like the others, it is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, using their CryEngine 3. Released in February 2013, it is well known to make even powerful system choke. It has probably the highest graphics requirements of any game available today. Unfortunately, Crytek didnt include a standardized benchmark with Crysis 3. While the enemies will move about on their own, we will attempt to keep the same testing process for each test.

Gigabyte HD7870 Crysis 3 Graphics

Crysis is well know for being highly graphic intensive, previously it was run at Medium settings to make it playable on lower end cards as they have problems running at maximum settings.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Crysis 3 1080p

Crysis 3 has finally broken the 50FPS mark at Medium settings with the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290. Receiving an average FPS of 55.4, it is evident that we can increase the graphics quality with the Sapphire card.

Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 Crysis 3 Eyefinity

For the Eyefinity test, we went ahead and increased the graphics quality to Very High to see how it would do. At 5760×1080, the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290 got an average FPS of 15.167 which is really too low to play regularly, but it sure did make Crysis 3 great to look at.

Benchmark Results: At Medium settings, Crysis 3 was very playable with 55.4FPS when run at 1080p. In the Eyefinity configuration of 5760×1080 we increased the graphics quality to Very High, which dropped the FPS to 15.167 and proved to be too much for the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290; which really isn’t a huge surprise.