AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2014 2:00 PM 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.
Our final game sees the R9 285 and R9 280 close together, with cards either coming close to tying or trading the lead depending on the specific settings we use. Overall the use of color compression doesn’t seem to quite make up for the bandwidth loss, with the R9 280 generally taking a very small lead. For AMD in general however this is another strong game. The R9 285 has no trouble outperforming the GTX 760 at Maximum quality.
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Samus - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
Am I missing something or is this card slower than the 280...what the hell is going on?tuxRoller - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
Yeah, you're missing something:)Samus - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
BF4 its about 4% slower.Kenshiro70 - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
"something of a lateral move for AMD, which is something we very rarely see in this industry"Really? Seems like the industry has been rebadging for the last two release cycles. How about starting to test and show results on 4k screens? 60Hz ones are only $500 now, and that will put a little pressure on the industry to stop coasting. I have no intention of spending money on a minor bump up in specs. Bitcoin mining demand can't last forever.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
Error page 4: chart should read "lower is better"jeffrey - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
Saw this too, the Video Encode chart Ryan.Congrats btw!
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Whoops. Thanks.yannigr2 - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
Great article and review.The only bad news here I think is Mantle.
But on this matter, about Mantle, maybe a slower processor could show less of that performance drop or even keep performing better than DirectX11. Maybe one more test on a slower core, on an FX machine?
mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
What were AMD thinking? How can the 285 be a replacement for the 280, given itsreduced VRAM, while at the same time AMD is pushing Mantle? Makes no sense at all.
Despite driver issues, I'd kinda gotten used to seeing AMD be better than NVIDIA in
recent times for VRAM capacity. A new card with only 2GB is a step backwards. All
NVIDIA has to do is offer a midrange Maxwell with a minimum 4GB and they're home.
No idea if they will. Time will tell.
Ian.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
There you have it, and with no issues with boost. Sorry Chizow, so much for that. :PThanks for the in-depth review, Ryan. It appears that power consumption is going to vary from implementation to implementation. Lacking a reference model makes it tricky. Another review I read compared Gigabyte's Windforce OC 285 to a similarly mild OC'd 280, finding a substantial difference in the 285's favor.