The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus
by Ryan Smith on February 13, 2014 8:00 AM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
With AMD’s R7 260 series restructuring, NVIDIA’s closest competitor to the R7 265 and R7 260 for the moment is the GTX 650 Ti, with the GTX 660 also partially competing with the R7 265 from above. A win for AMD in this case is for the R7 260 to beat the GTX 650 Ti, and for the R7 265 to come within striking distance of the GTX 660.
To that end, both of AMD’s new cards have little trouble hitting their goals under Metro. At high quality settings the R7 265 is within 6% of the GTX 660 while the R7 260 edges out the GTX 650 Ti. Meanwhile at lower quality settings, where both cards should be far more playable than the 30-40fps rates we saw at high quality, both cards easily surpass NVIDIA’s closest competitors.
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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!