The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Our major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
Our Battlefield 3 benchmark is another game that traditionally favors NVIDIA, and that’s especially the case here. The 280X is generally well ahead of the GTX 760, but in this case the two are almost at parity. We’re essentially looking at GTX 760 performance for the 280X under BF3. If Battlefield 4 performs similarly, then AMD’s interest in Mantle and its performance improvements will be well placed.
Looking once more at our FCAT results, the delta percentages are extremely unremarkable. For most games this is going to be little more than a checklist; neither party has significant problems with single-GPU configurations at this time.
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varad - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Last 2 sections are missingA5 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
As is the [Product Specs] Table on Page 1.varad - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Looks like there are many more diagrams and charts missingyacoub35 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Yep. Article was probably set to auto-post but the associated images (and apparently the last two pages) are missing.Anyway, the gist of this seems to be that the 280X is the price and performance the 7970 should have been two years ago. But since they went with crazy-high pricing on the 7900 series, they can now release this product at the price point that would have been appropriate two years ago and still make out like bandits with reworked 7900 hardware which must be exceptionally cheap for them to produce at this age of maturity on the fabs. Good for their revenue, but probably not going to entice NVidia to drop their prices much.
If this is what we're getting as top-of-the-line in the normal-people price bracket from AMD, it makes me happy I picked up a 7970 on a great sale recently.
Now we can watch the 290X, which should be $399, $100 more or less than the 280X in keeping with the normal pricing separation between models, come in around $549 instead. What a joke.
Spoelie - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
How is that different from EVERY OTHER COMPANY out there? What about NVIDIA to introduce Titan at a 1000 when their next highest card was at 500?Prices are dictated by competitive landscape and demand/price curves, maximizing profit - not by what you want it to cost, or some mathematical ideal of "perfect 100$ separation". Don't like it, don't buy it.
Galidou - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
+1 for Spoelieblanarahul - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Am I the only when who is happy that we finally get a long awaited price cut? The stores in my country don't drop prices like the Americans' do. So for me, it's a great time to upgrade. GPU power has never been so cheap!blanarahul - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Correction: "Am I the only 'one' who is happy....."Sigh. Brain fart.
HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - link
I don't think I saw him comment on how much he was glad nVidia wasn't like AMD. I'm pretty sure he was just commenting on how AMD was doing something he didn't like.No need to kneejerk defend AMD, friend. Just allow him to be annoyed with AMD for doing something that is annoying. When nVidia does it, he can be annoyed with them, too. Nothing in his post screams, "nVidia's okay when they do it!"
Galidou - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link
yacoub35's comment was plain stupid and lacked of analysis he says: ''280X is the price and performance the 7970 should have been two years ago. But since they went with crazy-high pricing on the 7900 series''. Nope, 7970 price was higher at launch like every other card for a reason, it was the new stuff. Like many generation, a new card replaces the old king at or a little Under it's price to let the old king on the shelves sell for a reasonable amount. Difference from before is that the price cut happens during the life of the video card because they live longer on the shelves. So when the new stuff comes out, the old stuff is priced already correctly so no one feels SOO bad for buying a video card a month before new ones come out and lower the prices by a LARGE amount.