AMD R9 380

[leunaM]

Hello!

 

I just ordered this card (the Nitro variant) any thoughts?

 

Was it a good purchase? 

 

Could have the GTX 960 been a better option?

 

 

Thanks guys!   

[bip_]

I would say it was good purchase. If it was me I would have chosen 960, just because I like Nvidia more. The two a really similar in performance, so either one is pretty good. 

[don_svetlio]

Fantastic purchase for that price point

The 960 falls behind by around 15% at the time of writing this.

[OAcesync]

Good option that memory bus just holds back the 960 4GB so much.

[leunaM]

Sweet! Thanks guys

[othertomperson]

Good option that memory bus just holds back the 960 4GB so much.

 

People have always said that about Nvidia cards right up to the 780 Ti and there's never been any evidence supporting it. To me it just looks like AMD went the route of overengineering the hardware, while Nvidia went the route of optimisation. Both seemed to reach the same end result.

 

Even AMD isn't immune from this criticism, the 285 (aka the 380) has a much smaller bus than the 280X and less VRAM as well yet AMD claim that its memory performance surpasses the older card.

 

It strikes me as funny that you guys think you can look at some numbers on a chart and think you can assess cards more accurately than either Nvidia or AMD.

 

As to OP's question -- the 285 and 960 perform interchangeably. It would have been a different option, but you can't truthfully claim one is better than the other.

[OAcesync]

People have always said that about Nvidia cards right up to the 780 Ti and there's never been any evidence supporting it. To me it just looks like AMD went the route of overengineering the hardware, while Nvidia went the route of optimisation. Both seemed to reach the same end result.

 

Even AMD isn't immune from this criticism, the 285 (aka the 380) has a much smaller bus than the 280X and less VRAM as well yet AMD claim that its memory performance surpasses the older card.

 

It strikes me as funny that you guys think you can look at some numbers on a chart and think you can assess cards more accurately than either Nvidia or AMD.

 

As to OP's question -- the 285 and 960 perform interchangeably. It would have been a different option, but you can't truthfully claim one is better than the other.

Well you can't always believe what AMD or Nvidia say about cards, Fury X was hyped up to be than 980Ti through all sorts of supposed benchamarks and AMD did well hyping it up to be the best card on the market but we all know how that turned out. Not disagreeing that the 380(285) is pretty much similar to the 960 but you can't always believe what companies say and I would still take a 280X over a 380.

[Sam Z Man]

I would say a 285 or 280X that's on clearance price would be better but its a good card none the less.

[RuLeZ]

R9 380 is normally a bit faster, and offer full support of the technologies of AMD, since its a card of GCN 1.2

I also recommend to get the 4GB version.

[othertomperson]

Well you can't always believe what AMD or Nvidia say about cards, Fury X was hyped up to be than 980Ti through all sorts of supposed benchamarks and AMD did well hyping it up to be the best card on the market but we all know how that turned out. Not disagreeing that the 380(285) is pretty much similar to the 960 but you can't always believe what companies say and I would still take a 280X over a 380.

 

The 280X is a more powerful GPU than the 285. However due to the 285's more efficient colour compression its 2GB vram with its 256 bit bus goes further than the 280X's 3GB on its 384 bit bus. This is why whenever people bring up the 960's 128 bit bus I'm sceptical that they have a truly complete enough understanding about all of the technology used to make a remotely informed decision. Deeply sceptical.

 

This goes into why I rolled my eyes at all the screaming of "false advertising" of the 970. These numbers mean sweet fuck all without a whole lot of contextual information that is extremely esoteric and complex. You're much better off ignoring them and looking at actual benchmark results and seeing how it genuinely performs in games and using that as a metric. Then it doesn't matter if you're mistaken about its memory bus, or ROPs or Fury X's dramatically optimistic marketing "statistics".

[Hieb]

Hello!

 

I just ordered this card (the Nitro variant) any thoughts?

 

Was it a good purchase? 

 

Could have the GTX 960 been a better option?

 

 

Thanks guys!   

 

The R9 380 outperforms the GTX 960 by about 10-15% out of the box.