The Talos Principle

Croteam’s first person puzzle and exploration game The Talos Principle may not involve much action, but the game’s lush environments still put even fast video cards to good use. Coupled with the use of 4x MSAA at Ultra quality, and even a tranquil puzzle game like Talos can make a good case for more powerful video cards.

The Talos Principle - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality

The Talos Principle - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

Coming off of AMD’s poor Dragon Age performance, The Talos Principle offers the R9 Fury X a much-needed win. At 4K with Ultra quality settings the card is able to hit 57.2fps, just shy of 60fps. More importantly it’s ahead of not only the GTX 980 Ti, but the GTX Titan X as well, taking down both of NVIDIA’s flagships at once. The 9% lead over the GTX 980 Ti is one of the best AMD will see all day, so this is a game that’s clearly in AMD’s favor.

Do note however that AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X. Thankfully for AMD this is an example of a game where a single GPU card is plenty for 4K gaming.

As for the R9 290X comparison, the results end up being very interesting. The R9 Fury X sees some very impressive gains here, improving over the R9 290X by 47% at 1440p and an amazing 60% at 4K. Given that the latter is outright outside our theoretical performance window for a shader-bound scenario, I suspect there’s more at play here than just GPU improvements. And sure enough, running the modified Catalyst 15.15 drivers on the R9 290X finds that performance improves by 21% at 4K, to 43.6fps, so it looks like AMD has been doing some optimizing for this game.

Dragon Age: Inquisition Far Cry 4
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  • nader_21007 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link

    As an analyst , I Guarantee AMD’s Success by taking the following simple steps:

    1. To Stop wasting money on R&D investments altogether at once.
    2. To employ a bunch of marketers like Chizow, N7, AMDesperate, . . . to Spread Rumors and bash best products of the competition, constantly.
    3. To Invest saved money (R&D wasted money on new techs like HBM, Low level API Mantle, Premium water cooler, etc, etc) in Hardware Review sites to Magnify your products Strengths and the competition’s Weaknesses.
    (Note: Consumers won’t judge your product against the competition in practice, They just accept what they see in Hardware Review sites & Forums)

    I just gave these advices to some companies in the past, and believe me, one have the best CPU out there, and the other make the best GPU. Innovation is not an R&D’s fruth, it’s a Marketing FRUTH.

    Please contact me for more details, Regards.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link

    Astroturfing got Samsung smacked with a penalty, but a smart company would hire astroturfers who are good at disguising their bias, not obvious trolls.
  • SanX - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link

    AMD only hope left is that company with better lithography like Samsung for example buy it entirely. You're welcome, Samsung. Hope you will not forget my as always brilliant advices.
  • amro12 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link

    Why no 970? 290? At least a 970, it's better than that 290x up there...
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link

    Perhaps because the 970 should have been withdrawn from the market for fraud? It should have been relabeled the 965 and consumers who bought one should have been offered more than just a refund.
  • Innokentij - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link

    To be from Oxford u seem to lack logical thinking.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link

    I'm logical enough to see a comment with no substance to it.
  • chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link

    Of course this is nonsense, if the 970 launched at its corrected specs, would you have a problem with its product placement? Of course not. But let's all act as if this is the first and last time a cut down ASIC is sold at a lower price:performance segment nonetheless!
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link

    Your post in no way rebuts what I wrote.
  • Hxx - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link

    right because that 0.5 partition really hindered its performance lol. Lets face it , the 970 is an excellent performer with more vram than last gen nvidia's top dog (870 ti) and performing within 15% from nvidia's top tier gtx 980 for $200 less...what more there is to say?

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