The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus
by Ryan Smith on February 13, 2014 8:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Our latest addition to our benchmark suite and our current major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has finally reached a point where it’s stable enough for benchmark use, giving us the ability to profile one of the most popular and strenuous shooters out there. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Our first review with Battlefield 4 finds AMD firmly in the driver’s seat, easily surpassing NVIDIA’s closest competitors while often putting more expensive NVIDIA cards in a bind. To this end we see that both the R7 265 and R7 260 are best suited for 1080p at medium quality, as the R7 265’s additional performance comes up a bit short of making high quality playable.
Ultimately we have the R7 260 beating the GTX 650 Ti by 19% and the R7 265 even beating the GTX 660, in the latter case by 12%. Unfortunately for AMD, Mantle is a bust here. In this GPU bound test Mantle is just as likely to cause a minor performance regression as it is to cause a minor performance improvement. Mantle’s strength is in CPU bound scenarios so this isn’t a big surprise, but it does reiterate the fact that Direct3D isn’t dead on AMD cards when you have the CPU power to keep it happy.
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Death666Angel - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Who is surprised by that? No one that is following GPU reviews since multi-monitors became a thing for the consumer crowd. The first few generations had issues with monitors flickering in a multi-monitor setup because of too aggressive down clocking, so now they are being very conservative there and increase the clocks quite a bit.Solid State Brain - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
I don't think it's acceptable, though. AMD might have reduced idle consumption when a single monitor is being driven, but is still neglecting other usage scenarios that are becoming increasingly common. It's not even just a small power difference, especially with medium to high-end video cards.Da W - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
STFU.Anandtech had no problem calling 290 - 290X a terrible card because of its blower and the NOISE and crowning Nvidia once again. Much more now with AMD price hike.
The only biased guy here is YOU Nvidia fanboy.
silverblue - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
I don't think the price hikes are AMD's fault per se, however considering the inflated prices due to bitmining, you'd definitely want a better cooler than the stock one. The third party cards handle this nicely.Da W - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
My last post was directed to HisDivineOrder but the reply button doesn't seem to place my reply below his post.formulav8 - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
They always complain when something good is said about AMD whether the good is justified or not justified. They don't care either way.SolMiester - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
If this is just the 7xxx rebadge, then I guess it has the same multi GPU frame pacing issues....LOL, why dont they fix the damn thing FFS!...no CF Eyefinity, no DX9 pacing.....still shit!fiasse - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Typo 'and R7 270 holding at $179 (MSRP)'Mr Perfect - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
With the naming of the card being so close to the 260X, I was really hoping this would be a faster GN1.1 part. How does AMD expect TrueAudio to catch on if they keep releasing card that don't support it? Hopefully the 300 series will sort this out and I can grab one to play Thief on.fiasse - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
looks like another typo on Asus R7 260 page, 'but this is an especially treacherous position if R7 260X prices quickly come down to $199.'