#Ifire refrence video series#

#Ifire refrence video series#

Of course one of the other standout features that is brought to the R9 series is the ability to run Eyefinity without the need to have a DisplayPort monitor. The new R series of video cards bring with it some great new technology, and as we mentioned in our previous review, we really look forward to companies making use of the new Mantle API in upcoming games. Purely from a psychological standpoint, people will prefer something with the GTX 700 name scheme or the new R naming scheme from AMD, because they are newer models.Īt $199, the new R9 270X is a great video card. To stay up to date and current with the latest benchmarks and games available, we've changed our approach to adding new benchmarks.Īs we mentioned in our R7 260X review the other day, the fact that one of the main competitors to the new R series cards is under the GTX 600 naming means that people feel they're buying older technology. Because of that reason we have always just evaluated our benchmark line up every six months. Why are some graphs incomplete?Īdding new game benchmarks is a long, tedious and time consuming task as every video card has to be re-tested in those new benchmarks. Of course, if you're buying a 120 Hz monitor to take advantage of 3D, an average of 120 FPS in our benchmark means that in 3D you will have an average of 60 FPS, which again means you should expect some smooth gameplay. Moving from 60 FPS / 60 Hz to 120 FPS / 120 Hz brings with it a certain fluidity that can't really be explained, but instead has to be experienced. If you're the owner of a 120 Hz monitor, to get the most out of it you want to get around the 120 FPS mark. If we're getting an average of 60 FPS, we should have a minimum of 30 FPS or better and as mentioned above, it means we've got some smooth game play happening.ġ20 FPS - The new number that we've been hunting down over recent months. Other core related specifications include 32 ROPs, double that of the R6 260X, along with shared features like PCIe 3.0, DirectX 11.2 and a 28nm core.Ħ0 FPS - It's the average we look for when we don't have a minimum coming at us.

Taking a closer look at the specification, we can see that the core comes in at 1050MHz and offers a total of 1280 Stream Processors, significantly up on the 896 seen on the R6 260X. We've seen Sapphire offer this kind of technology on some of the mid-range models previously, but the issue we always had was that while you could run Eyefinity without the need for DisplayPort, these models simply didn't have the grunt to truly make Eyefinity gaming enjoyable. Instead you can use two DVI connectors and the HDMI port. No longer do you need to have a DisplayPort monitor to make use of Eyefinity. One of the cool new features that is brought to the new R9 series of video cards is the improvement in Eyefinity. Looking at the I/O, you don't see anything new with two Dual-Link DVI connectors a single HDMI connector and a DisplayPort connector to round everything off.