Wrap Upwards: No Surprises Here

We'd like to give thanks HIS for supplying us with their Radeon R9 IceQ X² graphics cards. The company's IceQ 10² libation performed exceptionally on all three cards and they await swell, too.

The Radeon R9 390X delivered exactly what you'd look for a slightly beefed upwards R9 290X with 20% faster GDDR5 retention. Before we began testing nosotros felt information technology was unrealistic for the R9 390X to offer more than a x% performance heave over the R9 290X and that supposition appears correct.

From the 8 games nosotros tested, the R9 390X was on average 9% faster than the R9 290X, viii% faster than the manifestly R9 390 and 6% slower than the GeForce GTX 980. The fact that AMD is offering such a pocket-sized functioning bump after 18 months will no doubt disappoint many of you. The truly unfortunate function is the R9 390X's price.

Currently the R9 290X can exist had for $330, so given the historic period of the R9 290X and the fact that the R9 390X offers such a small functioning bump, information technology should be introduced at most the same toll.

Sadly, however, the R9 390X carries an MSRP of $430, 30% more than than the current R9 290X for less than 10% additional operation. This is nonetheless a meliorate value than the GTX 980, costing xiv% less for but 7% less performance, but it's hardly plenty to get us excited.

This leaves us looking at the R9 390. The R9 390 is a considerably better value at $330, making it ~20% cheaper and only seven% slower than the 390X.

The R9 390 roughly matches the operation of the R9 290X, while technically being faster than the GTX 970, though the performance was much the same for both camps hither. Both GPUs should cost about the same, too, so you could become either manner though the GeForce consumes less power, runs cooler and will overclock meliorate.

Finally, we take the R9 380 at $200, a price point AMD has previously smothered with products. For the same price as the R9 285, the R9 380 is on boilerplate eight% faster and 6% slower than the R9 280X while matching the GTX 960. Picking between the R9 380 and GTX 960 will come down to personal preference, and again the Nvidia card has an edge in power consumption, cooling and overclocking.

It was interesting to see in games such as Tomb Raider which accept been optimized for the 3.5 twelvemonth one-time Hard disk 7950, the new R9 380 was no faster. In fact, if we overclocked the 7950 to match the R9 380's clock speeds, the older Hd 7950 is really a bit faster.

It's worth mentioning that with the supplied AMD Catalyst 15.15 Beta driver, the new Radeon 300 serial GPUs were slower than the 200 series in games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition, and then there'south notwithstanding room for optimization. Nosotros also found horrible scaling performance in Grid Autosport at 1080p and 1600p.

Ability consumption figures were comparable to previous generation cards, with the R9 390X existence in line with the R9 290X for case.

The Radeon 300 series is a bit of a mess. Some cards are GCN ane.2, some are GCN 1.one and some are even GCN 1.0 if yous tin believe that. Granted, this was besides the case with the Radeon 200 series, merely now the mix of architectures is even more prolific.

The only saving grace hither is the upcoming R9 Fury 10, which is coming next Wed for $650 and should outperform the GTX 980 Ti for the most function -- we await information technology to sit down between the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X. Armed with a whopping 4096 stream processors and the new HBM memory interface for an incredible 512GB/s memory bandwidth, the Radeon R9 Fury Ten is going to be a serious contender in the high-end GPU domain (see early benchmarks here). We expect forward to that.