The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX

Crysis 3

Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds the “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.

Not unlike Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 sees the R9 380X struggle to keep ahead of the GTX 960, and for that matter even the R9 380. In this case the additional shading and texturing resources just don’t do much for the card; it’s being bottlenecked elsewhere by other resources such as ROPs or geometry, as evidenced by the fact that the performance gain from overclock on the ASUS card is greater than the difference between the R9 380 and R9 380X. Unfortunately this also means that at 1080p even the ASUS card falls just short of the GTX 960.