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

Crysis 3

Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.

Crysis 3 ends up being the other game that AMD’s latest cards have some trouble with. The R7 260 simply doesn’t have what it takes to catch the GTX 650 Ti, seeming due to a memory bandwidth bottleneck. Meanwhile the R7 265 isn’t going to catch up to the GTX 660, but with that full 256-bit memory bus and the higher memory clockspeeds Pitcairn parts enjoy on the 200 series versus the 7800 series, it has enough memory bandwidth to hold close to the GTX 660.

Which on that note, this is by far the biggest lead the R7 265 has over the 7850. Between the higher clockspeed and the even greater memory bandwidth increase, it pulls well ahead of its most direct predecessor, giving it enough performance to average better than 60fps even on Medium settings, which is quite the accomplishment for a sub-$150 card on Crysis 3.