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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CaedenV - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
My guess is that these cards are factory OC'd, which means that they would need to be underclocked to run an apples-to-apples comparison at true 'stock' settings.Zeus Hai - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Can anyone confirm that AMD's Frame Limiter still doesn't work on Windows 10?nathanddrews - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
That's news to me.Just for you, I tested it using my i3-2100/HD7750/W10 test mule. VSync globally disabled in CCC, VSync disabled in Dota 2, Frame Target set to 60fps. Steam overlay shows 60fps and I see no signs of tearing or stuttering. To my knowledge, it never stopped working.
Zeus Hai - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Hmm.., it should have some tearing because it doesnt really sync with the monitor anyway, mate. Can you set it to 65, 70, 75? Mine doesnt work in LoL, I set it to 60, but it always fires up over 150fps+Dirk_Funk - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
LoL does have its own fps limiter, so perhaps that's causing a mix-up in the software. Also, LoL might be running in fake fullscreen mode whereas the catalyst fps limiter specifies it will "Reduce power consumption by running full-screen applications at reduced frame rates." I'm gonna go try a round of LoL now because you have me curious.Asomething - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Mine does, was just benching my new 290x and forgot to turn it off so my results were skewed by the 75fps frame cap i set.nirolf - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
There's "ASUS R9 Fury OC" mentioned in the first table in the Overclocking section.Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Thanks.Shadowmaster625 - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Tonga is an epic disaster. It is less than 10% more efficient than tahiti in terms of performance per watt, and in terms of performance per transistor (fps per mm^2) it apeears to be actually worse. Meanwhile, Nvidia releases maxwell which outperformas kepler on both these metrics not by some paltry 10% or less, but by a very wide margin.CiccioB - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
All the GCN architecture is a disaster.With TeraScale architecture AMD could fight with smaller dies and less W for a bit less performance.
With GCN AMD has to compete using larger and power hungry dies that have brought it to go in red also in the graphics division, while with older TeraScale it at least could be at least on par.
GCN is an architecture not up with that of the competition.
DP64 presence is not the problem, as AMD has kept on reducing it influence over every GCN step (starting from 1/4FP and ending to 1/24FP) with no real results under the power consumption term. They probably could just spare few mm^2 on the die, but they are too way back with memory compression (I can't really believe they never thought about that) and their bus are way too big, expensive and power hungry.
All the architecture is a fail. And DX12 is not going to solve anything, as if they ever raise their performances of 10% over the competition, they are still way back in efficiency both in terms of W and die size.