AMD Radeon R9 280X (ASUS DirectCU II TOP) benchmarked and reviewed

Tomb Raider

The Tomb Raider reboot is a superb looking game, one of the prettiest (Lara Croft has never look this gorgeous!), but that doesn’t make it the hardest to render. However, using features such as supersampled antialiasing exerts a lot of stress on the GPU, because it makes the game render at twice the monitor’s resolution of 2560×1440. That is a lot of work, even for the beefiest of cards.

Our Tomb Raider Review: Link

All the graphics setting were maxed out. Post Processing, High Precision and Tessellation were enabled. Antialiasing was set to 2x SSAA.

Our new Radeon handled whatever unreasonable demands Tomb Raider threw at it effortlessly. The R9 280X is again better than the GTX 770 in terms of frame latency time. The average FPS of the Radeon is slightly higher than the GeForce GTX 770, but that is irrelevant since the latency numbers are better. The difference between the 280X and the previous generation Radeons in terms of frame latency is massive. AMD has really upped their game.

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Sleeping Dogs

We never seem to be done enough with Square Enix’s open-world action take in Sleeping Dogs. An aging game, but still a very pretty one nevertheless. The open-world is demanding enough to test the latest graphics cards.

All settings are maxed out, inclusing Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, standing at 8x and 16x.

Sleeping Dogs is absolutely nailed by the R9 280X. Once again, the Radeon surpasses its main competitor the GTX 770 slightly in both of our tests i.e. Average FPS and 99th-percentile latency. These numbers tell the same story they did in our Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider benchmarks.

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GRID 2

CodeMasters’ follow up to the excellent GRID, GRID 2 uses the same engine as it’s predecessor and the DiRT games, with some minor tinkering here and there. GRID 2 uses the special “forward+” lighting path developed by AMD, and we decided to disable this since the performance hit was pretty steep, while the visual gain was minimal. Both AMD and Nvidia cards took a hit enabling this feature. Other than that, all the other settings were maxed up, with Multisampling (basically Anti-aliasing) set to 8x MSAA.

GRID 2 is handled considerably well by all the GPUs mentioned in this test, with only the Radeon HD 6970 lagging behind the rest. The R9 280X again performs exactly how it should and places itself exactly where it did in our previous tests, once again just beating the GTX 770.

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