Earlier this 12 months we determined to dust off the venerable GTX 980 Ti together with the Radeon R9 Fury X to see how they had been getting on it current titles and what, if whatever, had modified for the reason that we last checked them out. Although I only benchmarked six or so video games for that take a look at, we found aggressive results among the GTX 980 Ti and Fury X. Since then we've got had hundreds of requests to create a similar article comparing the Radeon R9 390 and GeForce GTX 970. So that’s precisely what we’re doing.

>Lined up I even have 22 video games, maximum of which might be very latest tiles and all have been examined at 1080p and 1440p. For contrast, we've not simply the GTX 970, however additionally the GTX 1070, 1060, 1050 Ti, RX 480 and RX 470, so we have to be capable of work out precisely where the R9 390 slots into these days’s panorama.

For checking out I even have taken my antique HIS Radeon R9 390 IceQ X2 OC pics card, benchmarked it in the manufacturing facility configuration and alternatively with a custom overclock. Out of the field the card features a middle clock velocity of 1020 MHz, that's a insignificant 2% enhance over the AMD reference clock frequency. I was able to manually improve the core frequency to 1120 MHz which turned into a in addition 10% overclock. By default the GDDR5 memory comes clocked at 1500MHz and for our custom overclock I driven it up to 1700 MHz for a throughput pace of 6.8 Gbps.

Finally, all testing turned into performed the usage of our Intel Core i7-7700K check device overclocked to four.9GHz with 32GB’s of DDR4-3000 reminiscence.

Test System Specs & Memory

  • Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.nine GHz
  • Asrock Z270 Extreme4
  • 32GB DDR4-3000 RAM
  • Samsung SSD 850 Evo 2TB
  • Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming [4GB]
  • Gainward GTX 970 Phantom [4GB]
  • MSI RX 470 Gaming X [4GB]
  • MSI RX 480 Gaming X [4GB]
  • MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X [3GB]
  • MSI RX 480 Gaming X [8GB]
  • HIS R9 390 IceQ X2 OC [8GB]
  • Gainward GTX 970 Phantom [4GB] OC
  • EVGA GTX 1060 FTW+ [6GB]
  • HIS R9 390 IceQ X2 OC [8GB] OC
  • Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming [8GB]
  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
  • GeForce Game Ready Driver 381.89
  • Crimson ReLive Edition 17.4.4

The R9 390 performs like a champ in Far Cry Primal, leaving the RX 480 behind and comfortably beating the GTX 970. Even factoring in overclocking, the R9 390 has just sufficient headroom to stay beforehand of the overclocked GTX 970.

Moving to 1440p the R9 390 stays very robust pushing 48 fps even as the overclocked GTX 970 does fall away dealing with simply 43 fps. It might seem that the bigger memory buffer of the R9 390 is gambling to its benefit here, that said each cards did play plenty higher at 1080p.

The Division is a visually stressful sport the use of the ultra first-class preset, however however the 390 makes out very well and as soon as overclocked averaged fifty eight fps at 1080p. This made it slightly quicker than the GTX 970 for top measure. Now at 1440p game enthusiasts will need to reduce the high-quality putting slightly as 43 fps on common with dips under 30fps isn’t best. The identical will be proper for GTX 970 owners.