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 - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

The Talos Principle - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

As of late AMD cards have been doing rather well on The Talos Principle, and the R9 380X is no exception. At 1080p AMD’s latest card is ahead by 20%, keeping the average framerate above 60fps. On the other hand the gains versus the R9 380 are more limited; the additional CUs only buy the 380X another 6% in performance.

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  • 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.

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