The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX
by Ryan Smith on November 23, 2015 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Asus
- Radeon 300
GRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
With GRID: Autosport we’re back to a close race between the R9 380X and the GTX 960. This is a game where the R9 380 and GTX 960 were virtually tied to begin with, so the additional CUs put the R9 380X over the edge. At the same time however the additional CUs only buy the card a 5% performance advantage over the R9 380, so for AMD it’s not as large of a lead over the GTX 960 as they’d like to see.
On a side note, when testing cards for this article we discovered that AMD has finally fixed their driver bottleneck on this game. So cards like the R9 390 can do better than 80fps and take better advantage of what the latest crop of 144Hz Freesync monitors can offer.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
101 Comments
View All Comments
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The power demands on the CPU are much more significant under a game than under FurMark.Also, that specific GTX 960 is an EVGA model with a ton of thermal/power headroom. So it's nowhere close to being TDP limited under Crysis.
Edit: My apologies to one of our posters. It looks like I managed to delete your post instead of replying to it...
The True Morbus - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
So after all this time, this graphics card has the same performance as the now 2 years old GTX760?Right... I'm beginning to think the 760 was the best purchase of my life.
RussianSensation - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Same performance? You may need to re-check benchmarks across the web. R9 380X is more than 40% faster than a GTX760 2GB. TPU has it 43% faster at 1080P and 45% faster at 1440P:http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_St...
If you only have a 2GB version of the 760, you are also reducing texture quality in many games like Titanfall, Shadow of Mordor and have choppiness in Watch Dogs, AC Unity, Black Ops 3, and simply cannot even enable highest textures in some games like Wolfenstein NWO.
R9 380X isn't anything special when we've seen GTX970/290/290X/390 for $250-270 but it beats your card easily by 35-40%.
Laststop311 - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380x was a pointless launch. 50 dollars less you can just get the 380 which is only 10% slower. Or 50 more dollars and just get the 390 which blows the 380x away. This card targets a very narrow range and wasn't really needed imo.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
I believe the difference in Shadow of Mordor between the 7970 and the 380x at 1080p may only be clockspeed and not a difference from Tahiti or Tonga!silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380X may come with extra features over the 7970, however has TrueAudio ever truly been tested? Its addition was to help reduce CPU usage and it would be a shame if it went unused in favour of the motherboard sound.silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Slight correction, it was to provide better effects, though I imagined that it would help a little with CPU usage anyway.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The only difference between them that counts is GCN 1.0 vs 1.2 TrueAudio has to be supported by the game and modor doesn't support it.Cryio - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
You guys REALLY need to switch to a Skylake i7 4.5 GHz with DDR4 3000+ system for benching GPUs.That Ivy 4.2 GHz is certainly holding back AMD GPUs, core parking issues, not as fancy drivers and all.
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The GPU testbed is due for a refresh. We'll be upgrading to Broadwell-E in 2016 once that's available.