Dragon Age: Inquisition

Our RPG of choice for 2015 is Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest game in the Dragon Age series of ARPGs. Offering an expansive world that can easily challenge even the best of our video cards, Dragon Age also offers us an alternative take on EA/DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, which powers this game along with Battlefield 4.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality - 0x MSAA

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 3840x2160 - High Quality

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality - 0x MSAA

Dragon Age is another solid win for AMD at 4K, with the R9 Fury taking an 8-11% lead over the GTX 980. However it’s also a game that’s better played at 1440p than 4K on the R9 Fury, at which point that lead shrinks to just 2%. At the very least the R9 Fury can claim to be the minimum card required to crack 60fps at that resolution, a feat the GTX 980 falls just short of.

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  • Goty - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Can you imagine the hassle upgrades would be with having to deal with two sockets instead of one?
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

    Not if the GPU socket standard is universal and backward compatible like PCI-E. It's only if companies get to make incompatible/proprietary sockets that that would be an issue.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    Yeah, let's put an additional 300 watts inside a socket laying flat on the motherboard - we can have a huge tube to flow the melting heat outside the case...

    Yep, that gigantic 8.9B trans core die, slap some pins on it... amd STILL loves pinned sockets...

    Yeah, time to move to the motherboard ... ROFLMAO

    I just can't believe it ... the smartest people in the world.
  • ant6n - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

    I'm definitely interested to see how well these cards would do in a rotated atx Silverstone case. I have one of those, and I'm concerned about the alignment of the fins. You basically want the heat to be able to move up vertically, out the back/top of the card.
  • ajlueke - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Priced in between the GTX 980 and the Fury X it is substantially faster than the former, and hardly any slower than the latter. Price performance wise this card is a fantastic option if it can be found around the MSRP, or found at all.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    NO, actually if you read, ha ha, and paid attention, lol, 10% more price for only 8% more performance... so it's ratio sucks compared to the NVIDIA GTX 980.

    Not a good deal, not good price perf compared to NVIDIA.

    Thanks for another amd fanboy blowout
  • Nagorak - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    One interesting thing from this review is looking at the performance of the older AMD cards. The improvement of the Fury vs the older cards was mentioned by Ryan Smith in the review, noting that performance hasn't improved that much. But there's a lot more to it than that. The relative performance of AMD's cards seem to have moved up a lot compared to their Nvidia competitors.

    Look at how the 290X stacks up against the GTX 780 in this review. It pretty much just blows it away. The 290X is performing close to the GTX 980 (which explains why the 390X which has faster memory is competitive with it). Meanwhile, the HD 7970 is now stacking up against the GTX 780.

    Now, look back at the performance at the time the 290X was released: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-2...

    It looks like performance on AMD's GCN chips has increased significantly. Meanwhile the GTX 780's performance has at best stayed the same, but actually looks to have decreased.

    Anandtech should really do a review of how performance has changed over time on these cards, because it seems the change has been pretty significant.
  • Nagorak - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    I don't know, maybe it's just different benchmark settings but the AMD cards look to be a bit more competitive to their counterparts than they were at release.
  • Stuka87 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Its been the case with all GCN cards. AMD continues to make driver optimizations. The 7970 is significantly faster now that it was at launch. Its one advantage of them all sharing a similar architecture.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    nvidia CARDS GAIN 10-20% AND MORE over their release drivers... but that all comes faster, on game release days, and without massive breaking of prior fixes, UNLIKE AMD, who takes forever and breaks half of what it prior bandaided, and it takes a year or two or three or even EOL for that fix to come.

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