(The GTX 950 supports HDMI 2.0 the Radeon R9 380 is limited to HDMI 1.4a’s 30Hz at 4K.)įor your money, you’ll get a mostly uncompromising mainstream 1080p gaming experience, hovering around 60fps at Ultra settings in many cases, though you may need to tone down some of the more extreme anti-aliasing options or set the graphics options to High in some of most strenuous titles-but only if the 60fps barrier is sacrosanct to you.
It consistently out-performs the heavily overclocked GTX 960 SSC in everything but GTA V, though Nvidia’s card hangs closely enough to be tempting if the R9 380’s power draw is a concern, or if you’re building a home theater PC and need an HDMI 2.0 port to output a 60Hz signal to a 4K TV.
It manages to keep the race tight in Dragon Age: Inquisition at Ultra settings, though the performance gap widens in the R9 380’s favor once you start to tone things back-which you may be likely to do, as dropping down to High settings lets you crack the fabled 60fps barrier with the R9 380, and flirt with it with the GTX 960.Īdd it all up and there’s only one conclusion to reach: Despite the higher power draw, the Radeon R9 380 is clearly the best graphics card for the money in the $200 price range.
Spoiler alert: GTA V is the only raw gaming benchmark that the GTX 960 wins. Note that frame rates look great here, but they’ll drop a bit once you start cranking the details beyond “normal.” That said, both the Radeon R9 380 and GTX 960 hit frame rates north of 60 frames per second with most options set to High or Very High, though we didn’t formally benchmark the games using higher detail settings. Because the game doesn’t have preset graphic levels, we enabled FXAA, set all configurable detail settings placed to Normal, and cranked all the sliders in the Graphics menu to the max. Grand Theft Auto V is notorious for hogging memory at higher resolutions, but it scales well and performs admirably at 1080p. We stuck to 1080p resolution alone, since going any higher is really pushing these cards further than they’re designed to go. The Radeon cards were tested with AMD’s newest Catalyst 15.7 drivers, while the GeForce cards used Nvidia’s 355.65 drivers. And since gamers on a budget may also have or be considering the older GeForce GTX 750 Ti or GTX 650 Ti Boost, we tested EVGA versions of those, as well.Įvery game was tested using its in-game benchmark, using the default graphics settings stated unless noted otherwise, with V-Sync and any vendor-specific features disabled. Ideally, it would’ve been nice to test the $150 Radeon R7 370, which performs slightly slower than the 270X, but alas, we don’t have one on hand. We also tossed in an older VisionTek R9 270X. Note that doing so doesn’t provide a direct simulation of the stock GTX 950’s behavior, however, due to the way Nvidia’s GPU boost works.
Read: not stock, though we also downclocked the GTX 950 to reference base clock speeds to represent very roughly stock performance for that card. We retested several additional graphics cards to get a sense for the Radeon R9 380’s value, including Nvidia’s competing $160 GeForce GTX 950 and $200 GeForce GTX 960, with both being EVGA Super Superclocked models. Those heat sink fins run across the length of the card to help vent heat out of the rear more easily, a design feature that AMD itself recently crowed about when introducing the Radeon R9 Nano. The VisionTek Radeon R9 380 sticks to stock specs from clock speeds to memory configuration, but spruces things up with a nice dual-fan custom cooling solution featuring a card-length heat sink and copper heat pipes.
VisionTek kindly sent us one of its 2GB R9 380s for testing, and you couldn’t ask for a better representative. The VisionTek Radeon R9 380’s port selection.
It’s available in models with 2GB or 4GB of memory, and since the Tonga GPU is still relatively new-August 2014 wasn’t that long ago-the R9 380 packs full support for DirectX 12 and helpful AMD features like FreeSync, Virtual Super Resolution, and Frame Rate Target Control, unlike the $150-and-up Radeon R7 370, which is based on a GPU from 2012.
Tech specs for the entire Radeon R300 series family.īecause of that, we won’t spend much time detailing the Radeon R9 380’s deepest, darkest details-just check the chart above if you’re interested. The memory speed also received a borderline-negligible 100MHz bump. Glancing over the spec sheet below, the only noticeable difference between the two is that the max clock speed was nudged up from 918MHz in the R9 285 to 970MHz in the “new” R9 380. You won’t find much new inside the R9 380 that wasn’t already available in the R9 285.