The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTHitman: Absolution
The second-to-last game in our lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.
Hitman is another title AMD’s GPUs do rather well in, leading to the 280X surpassing the GTX 770 by just shy of 9%. It seems silly to be comparing a $300 video card to what’s currently a $400 video card – and in the process not a battle AMD is explicitly setting out to fight – but it just goes to show just how competitive these two cards really are.
Meanwhile if you throw in a factory overclocked card like the Asus, then we can just crack 60fps at 2560. Though on a percentage basis the performance lead over the stock clocked 280X is trending close to the average at 7%.
Moving on to minimum framerates quickly, the picture does not significantly change. Hitman bottoms out in the high 40s for the stock 280X, a bit more than 10fps below the average.
The FCAT delta percentages remain unremarkable.
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Sabresiberian - Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - link
I don't think any current game dev can complain about the top API suites today when they don't even take advantage of the hardware available.Kudos to those beginning to take advantage of multiple cores in CPUs, but what you are doing clearly isn't enough. It is ridiculous that a 6-core hyperthreaded CPU doesn't provide a significant performance boost in any of today's games over a 4-core CPU without hyperthreading, and we've had them for 5 years now, so the hardware has been around longer than the development cycle of most games and should be taken advantage of by now. This is not the fault of Direct3D or OpenGL.
I'm excited about the possibilities of Mantle, but skeptical of the results. We'll see.
AnnihilatorX - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
On the page about TrueAudioshould it read:
Tensilica’s audio DSPs are task-specific programmable hardware, somewhere between fixed [s]function[s] and fully programmable in function,
?
Hixbot - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link
Well another gen of graphics cards and no serious change in performance per dollar. The past 2 years of PC hardware development have been BORING. Why do the big players refuse to compete seriously?fantasysportsguy - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link
So if you have an HD 7850, what is the upgrade path?SirKronan - Sunday, October 13, 2013 - link
"Of course the fact that AMD also needs to get rid of the 7000 series at the same time isn’t going to do them any favors. There’s no getting around the fact that similar 7000 series products are going to be equal to or cheaper than 200 series products, at least for the immediate launch. "This prediction turned out to be WRONG. It is what I was expecting as well, but the opposite happened. Every 7970 on just about every store I shop at seems to have JUMPED by about $80.
What the heck??
Compuservant - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
You do realize there is another Asus R9 280 GPU. The Asus R9 280X Matrix Platinum is their top model in this specific range and ships with a core overclock at 1,100mhz. The GDDR5 memory has also been overclocked to 1,600mhz (6.4Gbps effective).Aside from the massive overclock, Matrix R9 280X graphics cards have exclusive ROG VGA Hotwire technology built in for even more overclocking headroom. By wiring the Matrix R9 280X’s VGA Hotwire terminals to header connections on the motherboard, users are able to overvolt right away.
In conjunction with the TweakIt utility and the plus and minus buttons fitted to some ASUS ROG motherboards, VGA Hotwire puts overvolting adjustments at users’ fingertips – so they can gradually and safely increase power for higher speeds and smoother gaming. With Matrix R9 280X cards, TweakIt offers a wider voltage-modulation range than ever before and it’s also possible to immediately activate the dual 100mm fans — enabling maximum airflow and instant cooling at the touch of a button.
Most of above was cut and paste (sorry), but do you know of a supported motherboard for the i7 4770k CPU?
I think I read that the new cards can do crossfire without a bridge/connector. Imagine the performance for $650 or so, for 2 280x Matrix Platinums!
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I know the article is older, but I just got to it.In the overclocking section, you write:
"The Asus card meanwhile was good for 40MHz more, for a 4% base/4% boost overclock, while its memory could do an additional 800MHz (13%)."
But it base clock is factory overclocked at 6.4GHz and it achieves a 6.8GHz clock in your test, so it is "just" a 400 MHz boost.
Dragonheart.BY - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Is there any info about 280 non-x? Will it be released at all?inFormal - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
I m trying to find (& order) an Asus R9 280x DCII 3GB (Tahiti XTL) but everywhere i looked they're "OUT OF STOCK" ... what the fudge ? Don t they know that i am prone to do useless it shopping during December ?dsmogor - Friday, January 24, 2014 - link
Can SteamOS access that as well (by having Mantle somewhat integrated with OGL) we would have a winninng arch/software combination.