Let's begin with a brand new game, Call of Duty: Ghosts. Our full performance analysis of this title is coming soon, but here is a preview of what the sub-$200 graphics card market offers in this highly-anticipated title at 1920x1080 with high-quality details applied:


The Radeon R9 270 performs just like the Radeon HD 7870, exactly as we expected it to. It's slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 660, and significantly faster than the Radeon HD 7850 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, which appear a lot alike in this title.


The Curacao/Pitcairn-based GPUs boast the lowest frame time variance in our field of contenders, though this game generates more spikes than we want to see. It's still new, so lets see how subsequent driver updates change this moving forward.
- The Radeon R9 270: New, Or Renewed?
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: Call Of Duty: Ghosts
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Results: BioShock Infinite
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Results: Company Of Heroes 2
- Power And Temperature Benchmarks
- AMD Radeon R9 270: A Worthy Radeon HD 7870 Replacement
I doubt this card has too much headroom in that department. The 6-pin is a gift and a curse.
Frig... we've been stuck at 28nm for so long it's just "understood". You could get-away with leaving that whole column out.
the previous version, 7870 GHz edition and 7870 XT is now so cheap
I wonder if it will Crossfire with a HD7870 though.
I'm still looking forward to a review of the R7s...
name and tweaked performance that's slower or little better than the original,
and pretty much the same price point. Can someone explain where one can
find Moore's Law in all this? IMO it all looks like a waste of time. I mean, after
20 months, this is all we get? Not impressed at all. I'd hoped AMD wouldn't
go down the road of rebranding (it was bad enough with the 8800GT fiasco),
but I guess they figure enough people will fall for the PR. I foresee yet more
cards on eBay from disgruntled gamers who upgraded only to observe little
or no speed gain.
The 290/290X at least offer something tangible, whether it's solid performance,
good prices, or both, sans noise issues, but these reissued older GPUs really
irritate me. Reminds me of the lacklustre improvements we've had in CPU power,
the halting of price drops for SSDs, the shooting back up of RAM prices since
Feb, and so on. If the PC market is shrinking, I don't think one can blame it
entirely on the rise of tablets & suchlike, or the dislike many have of Win8;
instead, IMO these days there are simply fewer items that are worth buying
as upgrades. All this stalls demand, people stop buying, or buy less often
as they wait for something better, which makes it look like the market is
shrinking when infact users are just waiting for products that are worthy
of their cash.
Sometimes I think it's a pity that all the various 3rd-party GPU makers can't
combine their own talents and come up with a completely separate GPU
development path to NVIDIA and AMD. Surely there's enough skill & knowledge
by now at ASUS, Sapphire, Gigabyte, EVGA, HIS, etc., to do this. Oh if only...
Ian.