AMD Launches Radeon R9 380X, Fastest GPU Under $250 (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Although AMD's mid-range GPU line-up has been relatively strong for a while now, the company is launching the new Radeon R9 380X today with the goal of taking down competing graphics cards like NVIDIA's popular GeForce GTX 960. The Radeon R9 380X has a fully-functional AMD Tonga GPU with all 32 compute units / 2048 shader processors enabled. AMD's reference specifications call for 970MHz+ engine clock with 4GB of 1425MHz GDDR5 memory (5.7 Gbps effective). Typical board power is 190W and cards require a pair of supplemental 6-pin power feeds. The vast majority of the Radeon R9 380X cards that will hit the market, however, will likely be custom models that are factory overlcocked and look nothing like AMD's reference design. The Radeon R9 380X, or more specifically the factory overclocked Sapphire Nitro R9 380X tested, performed significantly better than AMD's Radeon R9 285 or NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960 across the board. The 380X, however, could not catch more powerful and more expensive cards like the GeForce GTX 970. Regardless, the Radeon R9 380X is easily the fastest graphics card on the market right now, under $250.

Comments

On Windows but not on Linux

[Jodka]

A good deal except for that AMD's Linux drivers are pretty bad. Link.

Re:Is AMD Better Now?

[netsavior]

AMD has better hardware, nvidia actually writes good drivers. Look at Fallout 4, the nvidia minimum system requirements...

Minimum card to play fallout 4 Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti:
when you compare the two cards it is insane, the difference in the driver is not to be taken lightly.
Radeon HD 7870 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti
2,560 GFLOPS vs 691.2 GFLOPS
23,592 vs 9,923 3dMark Vantage score
80 GTexel/s vs 28.8 GTexel/s


Basically at this point the general advice is: If you want to play games, buy nvidia... if you want to mine crypto currency block chains, buy Raedon.