The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
With the game set at its highest quality settings we find that the 7970 and up – including the 280X – are just fast enough to deliver 60fps even at 2560. On a competitive basis the 280X once again surpasses the GTX 770, although not by the margins we saw with DIRT: Showdown in our old benchmarking suite.
Our last round of delta percentages are the least exciting yet, with frametime deltas staying under 1%.
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maybeimwrong - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I am concerned that I have to "Return to Anandtech" from a major new product review. This site is not AMDtech. If you want to have a special AMD section that aggregates relevant content, I'm fine with that. I am not fine with reviews being visible only in a place that presents no means of accessing general content on the site. Presenting review articles in this way is a terrible decision, and readers will stop trusting your content if you keep it up. I say this as a big fan of the site: please change the way "AMD" articles are handled immediately.SolMiester - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Hmmm, just noticed that....buy out complete?toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
TrueAudio might die because they didn't add it to all their cards, very lazy and half baked.rtho782 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Can you Crossfire an R280 with a 7970? Would make for a cheap upgrade path as they are basically the same card...hodakaracer96 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
I currently own a 2-way sli 770 setup so I may be biased. It seems NVIDIA can still charge a premuim (maybe $50) over the R9 280x due to much better SLI/crossfire capiblity (I know the newest AMD beta drivers fix latency issues, but the fact NVIDIA does frame pacing in hardware makes me feel better about it) and better performance/watt. My room gets pretty toasty and my 750 watt power supply is already on the edge. even an extra 50 watts from 2 - R9280x's would be unwanted.Frenetic Pony - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
When it was AMD was firing key positions I knew it was bad, but now we know specifically HOW bad. Not a singe new GPU. I don't want Nvidia to have a monopoly damn it, maybe AMD should be looking at plans to sell to someone like Qualcomm if this holiday season doesn't hit it big for them.FuriousPop - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Aren't these the reference cards? So won't there be more tweaks, different coolers, OC's etc when the rest of them get a hold of it and start making their changes?If these truelly are reference cards, i thought these looked pretty good considering...
I understand an Asus one is tested - to be fair i have 2xasus 7970's tops, they tend to be slighty slower then the rest of the pack by little numbers however with better temps/noise lvls...
Bring on the 7970 bring bro aka. Titan Killer!
bwat47 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Nvidia has done re-badges like this too, they both do it.b3nzint - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
I see the cooler on r9-290x got 3 air tunnel at the back. Is ref. r9-280x will use the same cooler?Futureman666 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
now let's see NVidia lower the price of the GTX 770 4 GB so I can buy two of them and upgrade my rig . The price of those card are not right at the moment they should have been way lower . hope that AMD R9 will put enough pressure on NVidia . The only sour on this review seems once again AMD drivers (which seems to suck time and time again ) maybe Ryan did not have enough time to try 2 R9 280x card in crossfire .. I would have been impressed to see a comparison between the NVidia offerings 2 x gtx 760 and 2 x Gtx 770 in sli versus ... Maybe the damn drivers where not ready again to support these 2 cards in crossfire .. i'm eager to see the results