Tweet
AMD's 300 series graphics cards aren't getting a lot of love from the enthusiast community right now and on the face of it, it's not difficult to see why - each and every one of the products is a retooled version of existing processor designs, and the only actual new technology coming from AMD is the new Fury line of GPUs. But as the 'Rebrandeon' controversy continues, one thing is clear - regardless of whether the GPU itself is old or new, the performance is good and the fact that it now ships with 4GB of RAM is absolutely crucial.Sitting in the £150-£180 price tier, this market sector is one of the most important for both Nvidia and AMD. While the halo products like Fury X and GTX 980 Ti command the headlines, it's cards like the R9 380 and the GTX 960 that actually shift volume. It's also an area where AMD can make hay: Nvidia has just one product in this sector - and right now, we stand by our assertion that the GTX 960 is a card that's "good, but not great".
With the Radeon R9 380, what we're dealing with is effectively a slightly retooled version of the R9 285 we reviewed last September. There's some evidence to suggest a performance improvement between the two cards in like-for-like testing scenarios, but right now it seems clear that the biggest leaps in performance we see in our testing come from a better driver, which is currently only functional on older cards via unofficial hacks - though a unified driver must surely be coming sooner rather than later [UPDATE 9/7/15 10:03am: AMD has just released Catalyst 15.7 which appears to bring all the 300 series optimisations to 200 series owners]. The key issue here is that AMD is selling the R9 380 at a premium over the older 285, which has been on sale for as low as £120 across the last few months. To all intents and purposes, it could be suggested that with the 2GB R9 380, AMD has hiked prices for no substantial improvement in hardware performance - and that rankles.
Read more…
More...