The AMD Radeon R7 265 & R7 260 Review: Feat Sapphire & Asus
by Ryan Smith on February 13, 2014 8:00 AM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
The heavy shader workload presented by GRID 2’s lighting system is enough to significantly shake up our results compared to what we’ve seen with most other games. The performance gap between the R7 265 and R9 270 is very significant here, as the 20% gap in theoretical shader performance translates into an almost perfect 15% gap in performance. On the other hand the R7 260 once again easily flies by the R7 250X, taking an 18% lead.
On the other hand, compared to NVIDIA’s cards, the R7 265 does relatively well here. It won’t surpass the GTX 660 at either resolution, but it’s enough to hold close to its more expensive competitor. But the R7 260 will fall behind the GTX 650 Ti when using high quality settings, which is going to be necessary to hit the high framerates that racing games play best with.
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edzieba - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Are Anandtech considering a switch from average framerates to latency/frame-rating (either with Fraps or FCAT)?Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Frame pacing is an additional tool we run from time to time as is appropriate, but it's not something we'll use for every review. Frame pacing is largely influenced by drivers and hardware, neither of which shift much on a review-by-review basis. So it's primarily reserved for multi-GPU articles and new architectures as appropriate.And especially in the case of single-GPU setups, there's not much to look at. None of these cards has trouble delivering frames at a reasonably smooth pace.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU14/873
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Yeah, that's what you guys said before the whole frame latency thing broke, too. It's a shame you aren't doing proper monitoring to catch it the first time and are setting up a scenario where it flies under the radar yet again the next time AMD decides to get lax on making drivers.Then again, this article is in red, right? AMD News is right next to it. Hell, even the comment button is red. I'm guessing the AMD overlords wouldn't like it very much if you were constantly harping on something they dropped the ball on so completely that their competitor had to slowly explain to them how to even see the problem and then how to fix it.
gdansk - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
It's a shame. I'm with your argument. AnandTech should try to include as many indicative benchmarks as possible. At times FCAT is indicative.But sadly, calling someone a shill with only coincidence is no better than libel. You have made an unsubstantiated allegation. It is decidedly unscientific to insult one's professional integrity with mere coincidental insinuations and no evidence. Why would you do that?
Death666Angel - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
So they are in the pocket of nVidia, Intel, AMD, Android AND Apple? Wow, those companies must really be idiots then.Gigaplex - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
I don't know where you got all the other brands from, but technically yes Ars is in the pockets of AMD. See http://www.anandtech.com/portal/amd - this is sponsored by AMD.Gigaplex - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
Bah, AnandTech, not ArsDeath666Angel - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
I know _that_. But he is clearly insinuating that their opinions are bought by AMD. And since products from all those companies I listed (who are all competitors) regularly get recommendations, and Anandtech gets then accused of being paid shills, I find it funny that anyone thinks that is true. If they are bought by AMD as suggested, how come they don't come up with a benchmark track that makes AMD CPUs shine? Or how come they slammed the R9 so much for the noise? It's all pretty silly.nader_21007 - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
It seems that it hurts you how come this site is not biased and doesn't admire every thing Nvidia, like other sites? well you can go read Tom's Hardware, WCCFtech and every other hardware site, and be sure they will satisfy your needs.zodiacsoulmate - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Yea, it's like trying to compare samsung to apple again, sure you can say there is no way to compare which one is better hardware considered, the user experience is just not on pair...