The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX
by Ryan Smith on November 23, 2015 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Asus
- Radeon 300
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect that current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
Shadow of Mordor is the first game in our benchmark suite that really hammers memory capacity, which in turn drives a very large wedge between the 4GB R9 380X and the 2GB R9 380 and GTX 960. There’s simply no comparison here; even at 1080p the R9 380X is 50% or more ahead. And situations like this are a big reason that I believe that anything other than a budget card should come with 4GB at this time. Even if one is not buying an R9 380X, they should at least be buying a 4GB R9 380 or GTX 960.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that this is the only game that shows a real advantage for the R9 380X over the 7970. It’s possible that we’re looking at the differences in 3GB of memory versus 4GB, but given the results at 1440p versus 1080p, I suspect there’s a bit more going on here. Either way it shows that there will be times where a full Tonga card is a distinct improvement over a full Tahiti card.
Our minimum framerates reiterate what we saw in our averages. Even at 1080p the smaller 2GB cards get hit hard.
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Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The power demands on the CPU are much more significant under a game than under FurMark.Also, that specific GTX 960 is an EVGA model with a ton of thermal/power headroom. So it's nowhere close to being TDP limited under Crysis.
Edit: My apologies to one of our posters. It looks like I managed to delete your post instead of replying to it...
The True Morbus - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
So after all this time, this graphics card has the same performance as the now 2 years old GTX760?Right... I'm beginning to think the 760 was the best purchase of my life.
RussianSensation - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Same performance? You may need to re-check benchmarks across the web. R9 380X is more than 40% faster than a GTX760 2GB. TPU has it 43% faster at 1080P and 45% faster at 1440P:http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_St...
If you only have a 2GB version of the 760, you are also reducing texture quality in many games like Titanfall, Shadow of Mordor and have choppiness in Watch Dogs, AC Unity, Black Ops 3, and simply cannot even enable highest textures in some games like Wolfenstein NWO.
R9 380X isn't anything special when we've seen GTX970/290/290X/390 for $250-270 but it beats your card easily by 35-40%.
Laststop311 - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380x was a pointless launch. 50 dollars less you can just get the 380 which is only 10% slower. Or 50 more dollars and just get the 390 which blows the 380x away. This card targets a very narrow range and wasn't really needed imo.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
I believe the difference in Shadow of Mordor between the 7970 and the 380x at 1080p may only be clockspeed and not a difference from Tahiti or Tonga!silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380X may come with extra features over the 7970, however has TrueAudio ever truly been tested? Its addition was to help reduce CPU usage and it would be a shame if it went unused in favour of the motherboard sound.silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Slight correction, it was to provide better effects, though I imagined that it would help a little with CPU usage anyway.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The only difference between them that counts is GCN 1.0 vs 1.2 TrueAudio has to be supported by the game and modor doesn't support it.Cryio - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
You guys REALLY need to switch to a Skylake i7 4.5 GHz with DDR4 3000+ system for benching GPUs.That Ivy 4.2 GHz is certainly holding back AMD GPUs, core parking issues, not as fancy drivers and all.
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The GPU testbed is due for a refresh. We'll be upgrading to Broadwell-E in 2016 once that's available.