The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX

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.