Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB Graphics Card Review

GAME TESTS CONTINUED 

Witcher 3

The Witcher 3 is definitely one of the most highly anticipated game releases this year, and as the follow-up to developer CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 2 – which was one of the most graphically intense PC game when it was released – it has some big shoes to fill.

We test on “High” with NVIDIA HairWorks set to “Geralt” only, and post-processing set to “High” with FXAA enabled, at both 1080p and 1440p.

With the Witcher we can see our overclock taking the most effect for a 65% performance boost, after overclocking the experience was much better and we’re sure with some other settings turned down it can be a very playable experience at 1440P after clocking it.

Here we see a much more playable experience at stock and our overclock doesn’t seem to help too much here.

If you are interested in playing Witcher 3 on this card, the good news is it handles it quite well at 1080P

Project CARS

Project CARS is easily one of the biggest titles out there in racing sims, with realistic weather conditions, advanced lighting effects, and physics.  Slightly Mad Studios has had a pedigree in making racing games and this one is no slouch.

We test on Nurmburg Ring  in ‘Stormy’ weather conditions at ‘High’ settings with all forms of AA off  at 1 both 440p and 1080P

Here we note that our overclock gives us a nice boost 15% in average and maximum FPS but only 8% in minimum which is the most important side.

At 1080P however we see a much different story as there is virtually no difference in average and maximum FPS and we see a 10% boost in minimum. If you plan on running Project Cars we will tell you it runs much better outside of stormy weather.

ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS 

While it isn’t an amazing 1440P card, it does do a solid job of being an entry level 1440P card and a very good 1080P card. With that being said we would love to see how two of these would stack up at 1440P VS a R9 390X or GTX 980.

Overall we were very impressed with this cards performance and it should compete very well with Nvidia’s GTX 960, if not beat it, while remaining in price parity. This is what we like to see from AMD and Sapphire.

While we had the card with us, one of the biggest selling points to us is how well VSR looked upscaling from 1080P to 1440P and we can see that this is something that should definitely be considered when purchasing this card.

We also strongly recommend if you can afford the extra cost of a Freesync monitor to go out and get one, the difference you get in active sync monitors is hard to get across in a written article, but we were absolutely blown away by the difference in smoothness with Freesync turned on.

If you aren’t the kind of person who needs to run games on max settings and is willing to turn down some of the quality presets at 1080P this is the card for you. We strongly recommend it due to Sapphire’s fantastic Dual-X shroud and quality of design. With that we give it a Technology X Silver Seal.

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