Thief

Our newest addition to our benchmark suite is Eidos Monreal’s stealth action game, Thief. Set amidst a Victorian-era fantasy environment, Thief is an Unreal Engine 3 based title which makes use of a number of supplementary Direct3D 11 effects, including tessellation and advanced lighting. Adding further quality to the game on its highest settings is support for SSAA, which can eliminate most forms of aliasing while bringing even the most powerful video cards to their knees.

Thief - 2560x1440 - Very High Quality

Thief - 1920x1080 - Very High Quality

Thief - 1920x1080 - High Quality

With Mantle’s current performance regressions on R9 285, Thief is best played using the Direct3D renderer. In this case we have another situation where the R9 285 is doing unexpectedly well against the R9 280 and even R9 280X, edging out the latter in all three benchmarks. Thief does make use of SSAA at High and Very High qualities, so we may be seeing another case of color compression working its magic since the oversampling should improve image compressibility. Meanwhile for Sapphire’s factory overclock, the extra bandwidth savings offers some additional legroom to pull ahead of the stock card. This gives Sapphire’s overclock a roughly 4% performance advantage.

Thief - Min. Frame Rate - 2560x1440 - Very High Quality

Thief - Min. Frame Rate - 1920x1080 - Very High Quality

Thief - Min. Frame Rate - 1920x1080 - High Quality

However looking at minimum framerates, Thief is also another good example to question whether 2GB is really enough VRAM. Strong average framerates give way to inferior minimums, especially at 2560. This is one of the reasons we believe that the R9 285 is not a good match for 2560 in the long term.

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  • MrSpadge - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link

    The point is that Tonga is NOT a rebrand. It's a brand-new chip, AMD themselves call it the 3rd generation of GCN. Making a new chip costs AMD a sgnificant amount of money, that's why they haven't bothered yet to update Pitcairn to at least 2nd gen GCN (1.1). And I'm totally fine with that. It's also OK for nVidia to use GK104 for GTX760. What's not OK - from my point of view - is AMD investing into this new chip Tonga and hardly getting any real world benefit over the 3 year old Tahiti designs. If nVidia introduces a Maxwell which performs and costs them just the same as the previous Kepler, I'll call them out for this as well. But this is pretty much excluded, from what we've seen so far.

    "And I highly doubt the 285 is 'all amd has'."
    It's their 3rd gen GCN architecture, as they say themselves. There's going to be a bigger chip using this architecture, but apart from that I doubt we'll see anything from AMD in the next year which is not yet in Tonga.
  • just4U - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    The one nice thing about the 285 is it will have resale value that has been lost on the 280-290 series thanks in large part to bit mining. There's a good chance that most won't feel that the 285 (and future incarnations) were run into the ground like the earlier ones were.
  • Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link

    Nah, what's interesting is that Maxwell may not be worth "responding" too. It's an almost totally mobile focused design, one that's not even totally out yet. If these benchmarks hold true then it's very exciting for AMD's upcoming high end. Nvidia may end up with a 512bit bus as well, but AMD's bandwidth optimizations will mean a similarly specced card of their's will still handily beat anything NVIDIA has in terms of resolution scaling.

    Heck it may even be enough to get a single GPU capable of running games at 4k at a reasonable fps. And that would be awesome. Maxwell might be good for Nvidia's mobile business, but I doubt it's going to help them take back the top spot for high end stuff from AMD.
  • mindbomb - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link

    UVD always supported vc-1. The first version supported full decode of h264 and vc-1. You are thinking of nvidia, who didn't have full hardware decode on a real desktop part until fermi.
  • mindbomb - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link

    Not that it matters really. It stopped being relevant when hd-dvd lost to bluray.
  • Navvie - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link

    A lot of blu-rays have vc-1 content.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link

    Blu-ray.com has a database that you can search by codec. VC-1 is very much alive and thriving.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link

    According to my DXVA logs, the 280 did not support VC-1/WMV9. That is what I'm basing that on.
  • mindbomb - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link

    I think your logs are referring to the nvidia gtx 280, which did not support full vc-1 decode. AMD had it since the radeon 2600xt, which is ancient.
  • NikosD - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    True.

    One of the main advantages of first generation UVD (ATI Radeon HD2000 series) over Nvidia, was the full DXVA VLD support of both 1080p H.264 L4.1 (BluRay spec) and VC-1.

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