The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus
by Ryan Smith on February 13, 2014 8:00 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.
The heavy shader workload presented by GRID 2’s lighting system is enough to significantly shake up our results compared to what we’ve seen with most other games. The performance gap between the R7 265 and R9 270 is very significant here, as the 20% gap in theoretical shader performance translates into an almost perfect 15% gap in performance. On the other hand the R7 260 once again easily flies by the R7 250X, taking an 18% lead.
On the other hand, compared to NVIDIA’s cards, the R7 265 does relatively well here. It won’t surpass the GTX 660 at either resolution, but it’s enough to hold close to its more expensive competitor. But the R7 260 will fall behind the GTX 650 Ti when using high quality settings, which is going to be necessary to hit the high framerates that racing games play best with.
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AlucardX - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Since the 7850 was a great overclocker, I wonder how this rebadge product is. Any plans to overclocking with an increased Vcore?Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Not with this one. I only had 2 days to put this review together, so unfortunately there wasn't time for overclocking.krumme - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Intel Core i7-4960X at 4.2GHz with a 260 playing BF4 single player.Perhaps not the most realistic scenario in this world.
MrSpadge - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
It shows you what the card can do. If you're concerned about your CPU limiting you in BF4 multi player.. well, better read a CPU review.krumme - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
A user playing with the s260 will typically have dual core i3. Thats reality. Try that with or without mantle in Multiplayer 64 man on the big maps. It the difference between playable or not playable. Probably more than 50% difference in favor of mantle. Instaed we get this useless talk.Rebel1080 - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
What you're getting here is the equivalent of an Xbox One for $119 or PS4 for $149. It took Nvidia and ATI about 12-18 months just to release a video card of equal or better performance for under $199 after the seventh generation's (Xbox 360/PS3) debut. The fact that it only took 3 months to get to this level for under $150 during this generation only shows just how much $ony and M$FT low balled it's customers on specs.silverblue - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Except you then have to factor in the rest of the hardware to that price. Think about it - CPU, cooling, motherboard, memory (I don't think 8GB of GDDR5 is cheap), storage, case, power supply, software and the all-important input devices. Add in the fact that developers will get more out of the console GPUs than with the PC and I think you're ragging on them a bit too much.Antronman - Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - link
You mean 4GBs of DDR3. And likely high CAS latency too. Low-watt GPUs. Software only costs how much you pay the employees. Input ports are part of the mobo. DEVs do not get more out of the console GPUs. They are actually underclocked so that you don't need desktop-grade cooling. Consoles will never be serious gaming machines. People who buy consoles either won't spend the money on a good PC, can't spend the money, or would rather spend the money on dozens of games that they'll only play a couple of hours of and then just stick to one game.golemite - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
270's inflated prices are directly the result of cryptocoin mining as it has been found to offer an advantageous Kilo-hash to Watt ratio. It would be interesting and helpful to many out there if Anandtech started publishing KH/sec and KH/watt metrics in its review for Scrypt mining.Will Robinson - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link
Nice addition to the AMD lineup.... and a pretty convincing demolition of NVDA's competing cards.Thanx for the review!