A single 1080p monitor doesn’t appear to strain any of these cards using Far Cry 3’s High detail preset. Higher resolutions benefit from overclocking, but the load still appears too light to trigger throttling on the air-cooled card.

Anyone who believes they need at least 50 FPS at 5760x1080 will probably want to overclock. VisionTek's CryoVenom card overclocks better.

We hit the Ultra preset and 5760x1080 before the stock air-cooled card begins to stumble. That’s also where the overclocked water-cooled card excels.

Charting out frame rate over time shows that the stock card drops below 20 FPS during our benchmark. This game has always appeared a little choppy, even at higher frame rates. So we'll take whatever performance we can get in order to make Far Cry 3 a more enjoyable experience. We'd stick to the liquid-cooled CryoVenom at this specific setting.

- Can A Liquid-Cooled Radeon R9 290 Be Affordable?
- CryoVenom R9 290: Meet The Card
- Test Hardware And Benchmark Settings
- Overclocking
- Results: 3DMark
- Results: Tomb Raider And F1 2012
- Results: Arma 3
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Making A Value Case For Water-Cooling A GPU