Gaming Performance
Benchmark System and Software
When I wrote Seven Radeon R9 280X Graphics Cards, Rounded-Up, I made the assumption that most of our readers would know that gaming performance would correlate to clock rates, and focused most of my efforts on power, heat, and noise. We heard the feedback from that piece, though, and incorporated benchmark results into today's story.
I ran four carefully-selected titles at their highest quality settings, and then normalized and added the results. This yielded a performance index with AMD's Radeon R9 290 reference card serving as the 100-percent baseline.
| CPU And Cooler | Intel Core i7-3770K (Ivy Bridge) at 4.5 GHz Corsair H100i Compact Water Cooler (Gelid GC Extreme) |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Gigabyte G1. Sniper 3 (Z77 Express) |
| Memory | 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2133 |
| SSD | 2 x Corsair Neutron 480 GB |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate SP1 |
| Drivers | AMD Catalyst 13.12GeForce 331.82 |
| Benchmarks | Metro: Last LightBioShock InfiniteBattlefield 4 (Single-Player)Crysis 3 (DirectX 11) |
We warmed up each graphics card until it reached its peak temperature, keeping us as close as possible to real-world performance and to prevent unfair advantages for either AMD or Nvidia due to artificially high boost speeds. The cards were tested on an open bench table (blue bars) and in a closed mid-tower (red bars).
