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
Grand Theft Auto V
The open world action game in our benchmark suite is also the last game in our suite: Grand Theft Auto V. The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
Grand Theft Auto V is another game that punishes 2GB cards to a degree, which plays into the R9 380X’s favor. At 1080p this helps to keep the card 11% ahead of the GTX 960 and 5% ahead of the R9 380. That said, GTA is the one game where perhaps even the R9 380X isn’t powerful enough for no-compromises 1080p gaming, and while 38fps is more than playable (this was a 30fps console game), the 60fps PC standard will require giving up MSAA to hit that mark.
Meanwhile the 99th percentile framerates further drive home the point about 2GB cards being insufficient. However it also points out how even the R9 380X can’t stay above 30fps at all times, reiterating what we said above about possibly needing to drop MSAA to get the best 1080p performance on the R9 380X.
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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.