AMD Radeon R9 285 Review: Feat. Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2014 2:00 PM ESTBattlefield 4
Our latest addition to our benchmark suite and our current major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has finally reached a point where it’s stable enough for benchmark use, giving us the ability to profile one of the most popular and strenuous shooters out there. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Our first Mantle-enabled game, Battlefield 4 shows the current Mantle R9 285 performance regressions front and center. At every resolution the R9 285 loses performance, sometimes remarkably so. As a result it is limited to Direct3D.
Regressions aside, I feel like Battlefield 4 is a good case for why the R9 285 needs more VRAM, or at the very least it’s not a good choice for 2560x1440. The sustained performance at 2560 is too low for this game, and the performance loss compared to the 3GB R9 280 appears to be a direct result of VRAM pressure. If the R9 285 had more VRAM, I suspect it would reach parity with the R9 280, especially given what happens at 1080p with High settings.
In any case, this is also the first game where the R9 285 trades blows with the GTX 760 rather than taking a distinct lead. With both cards limited to Direct3D, both cards are also returning similar performance. Which for R9 285 and its higher price tag is essentially a loss.
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TiGr1982 - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
BTW, is Tonga the only new GPU AMD has to offer in 2014?(if I'm not mistaken, the previous one from AMD, Hawaii, was released back in October 2013, almost a year ago)
Does anybody know?
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
The thing is the moment I heard AMD explaining how Tonga was too new for current Mantle applications, I was like, "And there the other shoe is dropping."The promise of low level API is that you get low level access and the developer gets more of the burden of carrying the optimizations for the game instead of a driver team. This is great for the initial release of the game and great for the company that wants to have less of a (or no) driver team, but it's not so great for the end user who is going to wind up getting new cards and needing that Mantle version to work properly on games no longer supported by their developer.
It's hard enough getting publishers and/or developers to work on a game a year or more after release to fix bugs that creep in and in some cases hard to get them to bother with resolution switches, aspect ratio switches, the option to turn off FXAA, the option to choose a software-based AA of your choice, or any of a thousand more doohickeys we should have by now as bog-standard. Can you imagine now relying on that developer--many of whom go completely out of business after finishing said title if they happen to work for Activision or EA--to fix all the problems?
This is why a driver team is better working on it. Even though the driver team may be somewhat removed from the development of the game, the driver team continues to have an incentive to want to fix that game going forward, even if it's a game no longer under development at the publisher. You're going to be hard pressed to convince Bobby Kotick at Activision that it's worth it to keep updating versions of games older than six months (or a year for Call of Duty) because at a certain point, they WANT you to move on to another game. But nVidia and AMD (and I guess Intel?) want to make that game run well on next gen cards to help you move.
This is where Mantle is flawed and where Mantle will never recover. Every time they change GCN, it's going to wind up with a similar problem. And every time they'll wind up saying, "Just switch to the DX version." If Mantle cannot be relied upon for the future, then it is Glide 2.0.
And why even bother at all? Just stick with DirectX from the get-go, optimize for it (as nVidia has shown there is plenty of room for improvement), and stop wasting any money at all on Mantle since it's a temporary version that'll rapidly be out of date and unusable on future hardware.
The-Sponge - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I do not understand how they got there R9 270x temperatures, my OC'd R9 270x never even comes close to the temps they got....mac2j - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
It's great that they've caught up with H.264 on hardware and the card otherwise looks fine. The bottom line for me, though, is that I don't see the point of buying card now without H.265 on hardware and an HDMI 2.0 port - 2 things Maxwell will bring this year. I haven't heard what AMDs timetable is there though.P39Airacobra - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
It really irritates me that they are making these cards throttle to keep power and temps down! That is pathetic! If you can't make the thing right just don't make it! Even if it throttles .1mhz it should not be tolerated! We pay good money for this stuff and we should get what we pay for! It looks like the only AMD cards worth anything are the 270's and under. It stinks you have to go Nvidia to get more power! Because Nvidia really rapes people with their prices! But I must say the GTX 970 is priced great if it is still around $320. But AMD should have never even tried with this R9 285! First of all when you pay that much you should get more than 2GB. And another thing the card is pretty much limited to the performance of the R9 270's because of the V-Ram count! Yeah the 285 has more power than the 270's, But whats the point when you do not have enough V-Ram to take the extra power were you need a card like that to be? In other words if you are limited to 1080p anyway, Why pay the extra money when a R7 265 will handle anything at 1080p beautifully? This R9 285 is a pointless product! It is like buying a rusted out Ford Pinto with a V-8 engine! Yeah the engine is nice! But the car is a pos!P39Airacobra - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
(QUOTE) So a 2GB card is somewhat behind the times as far as cutting edge RAM goes, but it also means that such a card only has ¼ of the RAM capacity of the current-gen consoles, which is a potential problem for playing console ports on the PC (at least without sacrificing asset quality).(SIGH) So now even reviewers are pretending the consoles can outperform a mid range GPU! WOW! How about telling the truth like you did before you got paid off! The only reason a mid range card has problems with console ports is because they are no longer optimized! They just basically make it run on PC and say xxxx you customers here it is! And no the 8GB on the consoles are used for everything not for only V-Ram! We are not stupid idiots that fall for anything like the idiots in Germany back in the 1930's!