Test System and Setup
Today AMD is releasing the R9 380X, a full-fledged GCN 1.2 Tonga chip. The newest member of AMD's GCN stable is meant to take care of the upper mid-range, a segment of the market that can generally be served with cards just above or just below this price point, and with custom editions that offer factory overclocking that make them cross competitive above their line anyway, so AMD's introduction of the 380X is interesting.
It might not seem as if that segment is that important, being that there are plenty of R7 370's, and even R9 380's that cover this price range already from AIB's. But really it's all about giving consumers more choice when shopping for the right GPU for their rig. It's also obviously a business decision designed to take advantage of what are likely better yields of Tonga so that they may sell more and make more. But, regardless of the obvious, more choice for consumers is always a good thing even though it may seem to be a saturated market.
The direct competition in this price point is still the GTX 960, which also comes in many different 2GB and 4GB variants that have their 1024 CUDA cores clocked at rates that can make them good values for the money, depending on the overall goal of the system. There are some very obvious differences that set a full Tonga apart from the equivalent Maxwell from NVIDIA. With AMD, there's a larger memory bus, a standard configuration of 4GB of VRAM and it's red.
The R9 380X is a fully enabled Tonga, the first of it's kind on in the desktop space outside of mobile, and of course the iMac. This means that there are a full 32 compute units, 2048 stream processors running at 970MHz and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM clocked at up to 1425MHz, depending on what the board partners decide to do with it.
| AMD Radeon R9 380X | |
|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 2048 |
| Compute Units | 32 |
| ROPs | 32 |
| TMUs | 128 |
| Compute Performance | 3.97 TFLOPs |
| Clock Speed | 970 MHz |
| VRAM | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit |
| Memory Clock | 1425MHz |
| Bandwidth | 184GB/s |
| Die Size | 359mm² |
| TDP | 190W |
| Price | $229 |
| Power Connectors | 2 x 6-Pin |
My review sample is an ASUS Strix 380X OC which actually uses a variation of the Strix DCII cooler, to great effect. The shroud and massive heatsink, with it's thick heatpipe and the installed backplate are an attractive and effective package. It's not understated by any means, with the slightly "tribal" flourish standing out, but it's not an ugly card either.
| ASUS Strix R9 380X OC | |
|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 2048 |
| Compute Units | 32 |
| ROPs | 32 |
| TMUs | 128 |
| Compute Performance | 4 TFLOPs |
| Clock Speed | 1030MHz |
| VRAM | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit |
| Memory Clock | 1425MHz |
| Bandwidth | 184GB/s |
| Die Size | 359mm² |
| TDP | 190W |
| Price | $239 |
| Power Connectors | 2 x 6-Pin |
This particular card is of the OC variety, thus the core clock has been upped from the nominal 970MHz to a much more capable 1030MHz. And while it wasn't overclocked for this review, there seems to be some headroom left, especially with the cooler, making for even more performance possible from this particular package.
ASUS is just one partner that's launching a card today, with Gigabyte, XFX, Sapphire, HIS and PowerColor all partnering up with their custom cooled variants.
The R9 380X is being billed as a product that's capable of providing a good experience at 1440P and below. That isn't to say that it isn't capable of providing a satisfying experience at some titles at 4K, just that it likely won't meet the expectations of enthusiasts. From my experience, even Battlefront ran at a steady, albeit lower, framerate that was more than acceptable even for online play. This is likely a result of good optimization and a relatively wide memory bus with adequate VRAM attached. That positive result doesn't carry over to all games, though it's possible that with the right combination of settings, 4K can be a good choice.
For this review we'll benchmark at 1440P and 1080P on our home test bench. We're using the latest drivers, the only ones that properly recognize the 380X at the moment, 15.11.1 beta and we'll put it up against a number of cards at it's price point, slightly above and slightly below.
| Component | Selection |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-6600K |
| Motherboard | ASRock Z170 Extreme 4 |
| Power Supply | EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2 |
| SDD | SanDisk Extreme II 120GB |
| Storage Disk | Seagate 2TB |
| Memory | 16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2400 |
| Monitor | Dell P2715Q |
| Video Cards | AMD R9 380X, AMD R9 380, AMD R7 370, GeForce GTX 970, GeForce GTX 960, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 |
| Operating System | Window 10 64-Bit |
| Drivers | NVIDIA - 358.91 AMD - 15.11.1 Beta |
For this test we'll be going through six very demanding mostly modern games; Battlefield 4, Star Wars Battlefront, Crysis 3, Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto V and of course The Witcher III.
Battlefield 4 will be run at the Ultra preset with 2x MSAA enabled. The benchmark will consist of running through a 64 player Siege of Shanghai server.
Star Wars Battlefront will be played on the Endor Supremacy due to it's complexity and rich use of shader-based effects. This will be done at the Ultra preset with 2x MSAA enabled.
Crysis 3 will consist of playing through the first time you enter New York, as that's a very demanding scene. This will be done at Very High with 2x MSAA enabled.
Fallout 4 is slightly less optimized, yet still a very interesting and demanding benchmark. For this we'll turn on the Ultra preset and have God Rays set to High across the board. As with my performance analysis, I'll be running 60 seconds from the Red Rocket down to the quaint city of Concord. This should represent "average" scenes of graphical intensity.
Grand Theft Auto V will be on the highest settings for everything with 2x MSAA enabled. The last benchmark of the in-game suite will be used, as it offers the most varied and realistic scene.
The Witcher III will consist of running through the beautiful city of Novigrad with the Ultra preset used for both post processing and the graphics settings. GameWorks was turned off for all cards.
And to the heart of the matter, the performance of the 380X when compared to its closest rivals. The 380X being positioned where it is makes for an interesting proposition, because it may, or may not, actually out perform even it's closest in-house rival by a margin that that makes the slightly larger price worthwhile. But let's take a look.
Battlefield 4
The Frostbite engine has come a long way in the many years of its development. Even though it was released in 2013, it provides great insight into the capabilities of the modern GPU. DICE has done a great job making it look fantastic while generally running well on any number of GPU's It's still quite the challenge for even the most potent, however.
It's no surprise that compared to the 960 that the 380X is able to do very well. Even at Ultra settings with a lot of action happening on the screen, the framerate is averaging very high and is running very smoothly. Surprisingly, the 380X is very close in performance to the 970, which is a price bracket just above. It keeps pace quite well in Battlefield 4. Full Tonga is looking to be well suited to the desktop space already.
Star Wars Battlefront
Battlefront is a necessary evolution of the Frostbite 3 engine. It isn't revolutionary by any means, but the increased texture resolution combined with better use of lighting and shadows, as well as a drastic increase in complexity of the scenes in all the maps, make for a challenging benchmark. Being Frostbite 3, it's also very well optimized and runs well on everything, making it a great candidate for a benchmark.
Star Wars Battlefront is a bit more demanding than Battlefield 4. The Endor level itself is lush with vegetation, wildlife, Ewoks and plenty of explosions and other lighting effects that can make for a much more demanding scene. Overall it seems that the 380X leads its direct competitors, though only slightly in this case.
Crysis 3
Crysis 3 is still one of the best looking games around. It's a challenge for any video card and almost the standard for which we jokingly ask if something is powerful enough. The CryEngine is a very advanced engine and brings most GPU's to it's knees when everything is turned on, such as here.
Crysis 3 continues to bring GPU's to their knees, shaming even highly advanced and efficient chips like GCN and Maxwell. The 970 obviously has no trouble, but being more expensive and with more inherent resources to drive the scene to higher framerates, that's expected. The 380X does well at both 1440P and 1080P. Well enough to be playable without causing stuttering or issues. It's a smooth, albeit slow experience.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 isn't exactly the most breakthrough graphical update of an engine, or game series, ever. But it still is challenging to render and makes use of a lot of tessellation, one of the most resource hungry and complex operations a GPU can perform.
This is certainly faster than the 960 in Fallout 4, even with God Rays turned to High, a GameWorks enabled feature that should theoretically perform better on equivalent GPU's from NVIDIA. An average of 42.9 is not terrible, and faster than on console and it means a higher resolution. Merely turning down the effects can result in faster performance, so as to make up for the slow-downs that can happen further down the road in Fallout 4.
Grand Theft Auto V
GTA V is a gorgeously rendered game, and very memory intensive at that. It even has a built in memory usage meter so you can see precisely what effects use the most of your precious graphics VRAM. That being said, there are a tremendous amount of options available in game to mess with, and doesn't have any pre-defined graphical levels.
GTA V continues to be punishing, though the 4GB of VRAM and wide 256-bit bus do help to allow for a higher than 60FPS framerate at the maximum settings at 1080P and a very acceptable higher than 30FPS framerate.
The Witcher III
This is perhaps one of the most demanding games in our test arsenal. It makes use of some very high resolution textures and nearly every effect under the sun that you could possible think of to provide a very emotional and engrossing experience. It's a fantastic looking game and could very well be the new standard for GPU performance. This was benchmarked using version 1.11, the current version as of October.
The Witcher III is still a demanding game with everything turned up to it's highest settings. On Ultra, the 380 is able to make a good showing at 1080P, but is a bit short of a proper playable experience at 1440P. Turn down the preset to High, and it can be a great experience. More than acceptable.
Thorough Game Compilation to Better Represent the Real World
And of course there are always other games that you might play and enjoy, so while we don't compare these against the competition, the below graph should be able to provide a good representation and idea of what you can expect with a variety of other great games that exist.
1440P
All of the above games were played at the highest possible settings and 1440P. With a variety of games and game engines, the 380X is actually quite the capable card.
1080P
At 1080P the performance is even better. Minimums in all games represented don't go below 30FPS at all.
The 380X has a TDP of 190W, but as we well know, GCN can sometimes be a very power hungry architecture when heat increases appreciably. Thankfully the Strix DCII design is still a capable design that's able to keep things within an ideal temperature range so that current and voltage leakage due to increased heat is kept to a minimum.
The new power tests are conducted using a normal gaming load, during a bout of Crysis 3, so as to show a more average power draw that you can expect. This test was performed by using a Keithly 2110-220 digital multi-meter that was measuring the PCIE power draw itself. Idle power draw was measured after 15 minutes of inactivity, again measuring the PCIE draw itself.
Power consumption is right on target. In fact, the actual power consumption during a typical gaming load comes in below what was quoted, a very nice surprise. Full Tonga was the choice for the high-end mobile part, albeit at lower clock-speeds, likely due to the higher quality yields and ability to be within and below it's TDP.
But what of the temperature while playing games? For this test we measured the temperature of all cards after playing Crysis 3 for 30 minutes though HWiNFO64. Idle temperatures were calculated using HWiNFO64 after 15 minutes of inactivity on the desktop before starting Crysis 3.
Noise is a large concern for any card, high performance or otherwise. Being that this is based on the famed DCII cooler, the expectation is that it'll be relatively quiet, even with the good temperatures that it's able to maintain. Noise levels were measured using a Triplett Mini Sound Level Meter pointed at an open case 100cm away. This measures entire system noise from an open test-bench.
0DB is impressive, but of course it's because the ASUS Strix is capable of a 0DB idle, meaning it itself doesn't make noise at all. We, of course, can hear the system in the background, but a 0DB idle mode is a very valuable thing that not all NVIDIA cards are necessarily capable of. The Titan X reference design itself can't even pull off such a feat.
Conclusion
AMD's R9 380X might not seem as if it's really needed in a market that's already saturated at nearly all price points with AIB's offering their own variants of the 380 and 960 that brush the lower end of the $239 price of the ASUS 380X OC. There can even be very good deals on the 390 and 970 that may only be a few tens of dollars more, if you're willing to make use of a rebate of some kind. But really, this just presents an opportunity for more choice for consumers. It's a fast enough card compared to it's direct market rival that it could become the choice for gamers looking for a decent 1440P and great 1080P gaming experience without breaking the bank.
$229 for the stock version and $239 for an OC after market card is a good proposition. MSI's R9 380 Gaming is already $229 without any rebates, and offers slightly less performance. Given the potential overclocking headroom, the 380X has even more value. The equivalent 960 with 4GB of VRAM is perhaps only around $219 on a good day, slightly less for performance that's, again, less. 4GB of VRAM is a valuable commodity, as we've seen in Black Ops III, The Witcher III, Batman Arkham Knight and many others that show that non-optimized games can sometimes use up available VRAM very quickly. So here, you get that at a decent price. This presents a conundrum indeed. But overall, it's a good performer that's able to fill a niche that may not have been there to begin with, but allows us to consider something faster for slightly more money. It's a win-win, even if you can only see it as a business decision on AMD's part. This is a good card marred by, perhaps, bad timing. It's still recommended for those looking for 1440P gaming at this price.
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