The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus

Hitman: Absolution

The second-to-last game in our lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.

With Hitman: Absolution we’re once again back to a benchmark that AMD’s latest R7 260 series cards have little trouble taking the lead on. In this case the R7 265 surpasses the GTX 660 by 8% at both Ultra and Medium settings, while the R7 260 beats the GTX 650 Ti by 14% or more.

Stopping for a moment to take a look at some of our slower AMD cards, we can also see just how much things have improved over both the R7 250X and cards like the 5770. In the case of the R7 250X, the R7 260, a card with an MSRP all of $10 higher, is 24% faster, demonstrating just how much of a better value the R7 260 is in this AMD product stack, at least if it were priced where it should be. Meanwhile the R7 265 more than doubles the 5770 here, improving on the 5770’s performance by 2.2x.