The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTTotal War: Rome 2
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.
With Rome 2 AMD and NVIDIA once again flip places, with 280X besting even the GTX 770 by a few percent. All of these enthusiast/high-end cards are just fast enough to keep Rome playable in this situation, with average framerates hovering just a bit over 30fps.
RTS games can be a mixed bag for frametimes as we’ve seen in the past, but Rome presents no such problem. Everyone stays below 3% here.
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HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - link
Well, they did it for the Geforce 7xx series, so they probably had to do it for the new Radeons. That said, it's nice for users to see how little things changed. You know, for the people who didn't pay attention.I agree though it's kinda boring that we're gonna be stuck on the same Radeon series for another 6 months or year. At least nVidia seems vaguely on track with Maxwell, though unless something changes dramatically I think AMD is going to be putting 0 pressure on nVidia to release Maxwell.
Mantle could put pressure if they manage to get it into the gaming engines like they want. If so, they could force nVidia to 1) release their own API (and pay to be put in the same engines) or 2) put out better and better hardware to stay in the high level API with better performance.
Or they could do option 3) and do both.
IUU - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link
"These aren't new cards. They are basically the same GPU's AMD has been shipping for almost 2 years now and it looks like they are going to try and pass them off again for another year. Why was this treated as some big new thing with a long article and a bunch of benchmarks? This whole thing could have been done in a little 2 paragraph news blurb."Of course they are not new cards. I feel your frustration, but why would they be new?
They render crysis at 43 frames per second at a freaking 2560x1440 resolution, not to mention battlefield and other games. There is simply " no need" for new hardware because there are not p new games to justify stronger hardware. A stagnation in gaming industry would more appropriately describe the situation.
Not that there is nothing to add to improve visual quality of the games, they just won't do anything about it, at keast for now.
jasonelmore - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
disappointing to say the least. People were thinking this would perform at 780 levels are going to be dissapointed. i feel sorry for those that pre-ordered last week for $650+EzioAs - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
This is the 280X not the 290X....jasonelmore - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
ahh ok, i wouldnt have even bothered with this detailed of a review on rebadges with new firmware.EzioAs - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
We don't need you to bother anything when you don't even read the title much less the review itself.RyuDeshi - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Well seeing as you didn't even bother reading the first page I can see that.It's still worth reviewing so that when people are trying to compare current GPUs, they have updated benchmarks with newer firmware to support those purchase decisions. This goes for both the AMD and Nvidia cards. The worst part about looking up old reviews of say the 7970 (which this is a rebadge of) is that most of them are with older firmware, and AMD had a pretty nice boost a few months after their release which this review more accurately reflects.
jasonelmore - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
well i tried to edit my post literally 10 seconds after i posted but nope, looks like were still browsing 1999 websites that dont let you edit or delete your comments. anyways, yes i should have read the whole article to make any sort of comment at all. sorry.jasonelmore - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
btw the 1st page wasnt up yet, only the charts were posted when i read. this is the problem with posting reviews before they are done, and stuff.Morawka - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
yeah that was annoying