Hardware AMD Radeon R9 285 Review feat. Powercolor

Is that the factory applied goop ? It looks like it's been applied with a trowel.

 

might want to rephrase that - first page second from bottom paragraph.

Good review though, am also interested how the 4gb version performs in BF4.

 

Yawn, at most a few % more performance for the price over 280 which was at most a few % more performance over the 7950 - all basically the same card with minor tweaks. If you ignore the stupidly expensive top end then graphics market is getting as stagnant as the cpu one.

 

Or maybe the graphics market has cards to suit everyone's price and performance requirements.

 

Only a worth wile upgrade if you're coming from 5000 or 6000 series AMD cards really.

Troll time, on GPU test graphs in games, is it worth emphasising the 30 FPS line so, at a glance, you can see if a card falls below the "acceptable playing level"?

 

Except it brings trueaudio into the mid high end.

I am wondering if BF4's deferred rendering can't take advantage of the extra compression features that give the advantage in other games.

 

One could also say 45/40 fps, or 25/20 etc. Different users have different ideas on what is acceptable. Reviewers can't cater for everyone and have to pick the criteria they consider practical.

 

I really don't understand why it's called the R9 285 .

Surely it should be R9 275, how can it replace the 280 if it's barely touching the sides ?

 

The 285s interface and bandwidth seem low incomparison to the 280s seems odd to me.

 

While this is basically a cut-down 7950 (that I originally reviewed for bit-tech 2.5 years ago!), the thing that amazes me is the price. the 7950 launched at £350, and now this card is available for less than half that.

While you'd certainly feel that you'd gotten good mileage from your 7950 (or 7970) if you bought one at launch, that's a huge drop in price for performance over a 2.5 year period.

For comparison, we tested the 7950 on a 2500K, a £175 CPU at the time. In Comparison, the all new 4790K isn't that much faster, and costs even more!