AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2014 2:00 PM 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.
Metro, though perhaps a bit optimistic, does a decent job of setting the tone for this review. Right off the bat we can see that the R9 285 and R9 280 are performing closely to each other, with the newer R9 285 leading by 5-9%. On the whole this is greater than the average, but it’s otherwise a solid example of where the R9 285 fits into AMD’s world. In terms of design it is a lateral, but the same is also true from the resulting performance. It is not meant to – nor generally will it – perform differently from the R9 280 it replaces. R9 285 is in a nutshell an R9 280 with more features.
What this also means though is that AMD generally has the $250 price segment to themselves. In the case of Metro they have little trouble outperforming the GTX 760, and at times come close to the more expensive GTX 770. This is why Metro is a bit optimistic, since on the whole R9 285 isn’t quite enough to catch up to GTX 770.
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mczak - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
This is only partly true. AMD cards nowadays can stay at the same clocks in multimon as in single monitor mode though it's a bit more limited than GeForces. Hawaii, Tonga can keep the same low clocks (and thus idle power consumption) up to 3 monitors, as long as they all are identical (or rather more accurately probably, as long as they all use the same display timings). But if they have different timings (even if it's just 2 monitors), they will clock the memory to the max clock always (this is where nvidia kepler chips have an advantage - they will stay at low clocks even with 2, but not 3, different monitors).Actually I believe if you have 3 identical monitors, current kepler geforces won't be able to stick to the low clocks, but Hawaii and Tonga can, though unfortunately I wasn't able to find the numbers for the geforces - ht4u.net r9 285 review has the numbers for it, sorry I can't post the link as it won't get past the anandtech forum spam detector which is lame).
Solid State Brain - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
A twin monitor configuration where the secondary display is smaller / has a lower resolution than the primary one is a very common (and logic) usage scenario nowadays and that's what AMD should sort out first. I'm positively surprised that on newer Tonga GPUs if both displays are identical frequencies remain low (according to the review you pointed out), but I'm not going to purchase a different display (or limit my selection) to get advantage of that when there's no need to with equivalent NVidia GPUs.mczak - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Fixing this is probably not quite trivial. The problem is if you reclock the memory you can't honor memory requests for display scan out for some time. So, for single monitor, what you do is reclock during vertical blank. But if you have several displays with different timings, this won't work for obvious reasons, whereas if they have identical timings, you can just run them essentially in sync, so they have their vertical blank at the same time.I don't know how nvidia does it. One possibility would be a large enough display buffer (but I think it would need to be in the order of ~100kB or so, so not quite free in terms of hw cost).
PEJUman - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I used multimonitor with AMD & NVIDIA cards. I would take that 30W hit if it means working well.NVIDIA: too aggressive with low power mode, if you have video on one screen & game on the other, it will remain at the clock speed of the 1st event (if you start the video before the game loading, it will be stuck at the video clocks).
I used 780TI currently, R9 290x I had previously works better where it will always clock up...
hulu - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
The conclusions section of Crysis: Warhead seems to be copy-pasted from Crysis 3. R9 285 does not in fact trail GTX 760.thepaleobiker - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
@Ryan - A small typo on the last page, last line of first paragraph - "Functionally speaking it’s just an R9 285 with more features"It should be R9 280, not 285. Just wanted to call it out for you! :)
Bring on more Tonga, AMD!
FriendlyUser - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
I would like to note that if memory compression is effective, it should not only improve bandwidth but also reduce the need for texture memory. Maybe 2GB with compression is closer to 3GB in practice, at least if the ~40% compression advantage is true.Obviously, there is no way to predict the future, but I think your conclusion concerning 2GB boards should take compression in account.
Spirall - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
If GCN1.2 (instead of a GCN 2.0) is what AMD has to offer as the new arquitecture for their next year cards, Maxwell (based in 750Ti x 260X tests), will punch hard AMD in terms of performance per watt and production cost (not price) so their net income.shing3232 - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
750ti use a better 28nm process call HPM while rest of the 200 series use HPL , that's the reason why maxwell are so efficient.Spirall - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
I'm afraid this won't be enough (but hope it does). Anyway, as Nvidia is expected to launch their Maxwell 256 bits card nearby, we'll have the answer soon.