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Released just a month before the Xbox One and PS4 hit UK retail, the Radeon R7 260X is a value-focused graphics card that brings stiff competition to both next-gen platforms. In essence, we're promised a card that can deliver true, next-gen calibre results at under a third of the cost of a new console - the price-tag being just south of £100 at the time of writing. But just how does such a card stack up to the console experience when playing Battlefield 4 or Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag? And indeed, can we go one further in the visual stakes - while still hitting the same performance targets?First things first, let's address a few salient points on the card itself. The 260X is a through-and-through rebrand of the Radeon HD 7790 we reviewed last year, complete with the very same 28nm processed Bonaire XT chipset (in itself, the basis for the Xbox One GPU) - but now with minor clock tweaks and a cheaper price-tag. The changes are easy to list: we get a core clock bump of 10 per cent, going from 1GHz to 1.1GHz. Otherwise, the restrictive 128-bit memory bus remains, but the memory speed increase to 6.5GHz (compared to 6GHz on the 7790) means a fill-rate of 102.4GB/s is now possible - a respectable update over the 96GB/s of the last card.
In terms of features, this refresh gets all the potential benefits of AMD's as-yet untested Mantle interface (an alternative to DirectX that's soon to be supported by Battlefield 4). As a bonus, the 260X also comes with a dedicated TrueAudio sound processing unit, absent from its pricier 270X and 280X siblings. This works entirely independently of graphical tasks, allowing developers to add spatialisation, reverb and a mastering of sound not possible on most users' motherboard sound.
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