AMD Radeon R7 265 Review: Curaçao Slides In At $150

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With pricing all over the map, AMD wants to plug the gap between its Radeon R7 260X and R9 270. To that end, it's introducing a Curaçao-based Radeon R7 265 with better-than-Radeon HD 7850 performance at $150. Will that be enough to stave off Maxwell?

Results: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a demanding title. However, the Radeon R7 265 is able to muscle through the Normal detail settings with motion blur, FXAA, SSAO, god rays, and volumetric fog enabled without falling below 38 FPS.

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Note the tie between AMD's Radeon R7 260X and 265. As we noted on the first page, the 260X has fewer shaders running at higher clock rates, enabling better performance, in theory. With more demanding effects enabled, Assassin's Creed isn't pushing these cards' memory subsystems as hard, resulting in more parity between the GPUs than you might have expected.

Frame time variance is consistently low in this game, which is a good thing.

Don Woligroski
118 Comments Comment from the forums
  • yankeeDDL
    I think the pricing issue is a moot point.If There's an Nvidia card at $190, an equally-performing (or slightly slower) car will be sold for $180 making a good profit, not at $150 to kill Nvidia.Card manufacturer won't benefit from Nvidia being pushed out of the market.
    Reply
  • Novuake
    Compelling card, but sad that a price hike on the 270 had to force it. So seems useless now.
    Reply
  • meluvcookies
    A 25% increase on the R9 270 was, essentially, a betrayal of consumer trust by AMD. I was totally excited to get in at the $180 price point, but now I'm waiting for Nvidia's offerings in that neighborhood to see if they can offer anything as compelling as the 270 was a couple months ago when it was still at its original price.
    Reply
  • huilun02
    War on the high end segment over.Now Jihad style attack on mid end.
    Reply
  • firefoxx04
    Wow, If it beats the 7850, I wonder how it stacks up against my overclocked 6850. I have two in crossfire but being limited to 1GB vram can be a hindrance. When I bought my original 6850, it was only $150 and my second was $100. I wonder what AMD has for $250 that could smoke my current setup / aka be a good single card upgrade.
    Reply
  • Tzn
    i am not impressed at all, if it was under 100w then yes.
    Reply
  • huilun02
    12670915 said:
    Wow, If it beats the 7850, I wonder how it stacks up against my overclocked 6850. I have two in crossfire but being limited to 1GB vram can be a hindrance. When I bought my original 6850, it was only $150 and my second was $100. I wonder what AMD has for $250 that could smoke my current setup / aka be a good single card upgrade.

    http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/amd_radeon_r9_280_in_the_works.html
    Reply
  • TechnoD
    All these price hikes are really becoming an issue. This card is launching at the same price I paid for my 7950 ~5 months ago.
    Reply
  • jin_mtvt
    And what does using more than 100W at full load has to do with this card? First we have someone complaining about not having enough " additional power pins " than someone compains about more than 100W usage on a "desktop" GPU. You are lame.Onto the pricing problem, i should not have to remind you that the prices in most of the world ( you know everywhere out of north america ) haven't followed the same trends as here . the 290 never went bozo up to 650$ in Europe ( if you use the exchange rate in position before december when the price was set ) . I would like to read more about who is really "jacking" up the prices . This card needs to be 150$, not 180$ of course , else it would be m00t .
    Reply
  • selvakumar13
    so you are saying that R7 265 is best GPU in this price range?
    Reply