The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus

GRID 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.