AMD Radeon R7 260X Pro Reviews

Same performance as the HD 7790, but it’s still a bargain card that lets you play many of the latest games at the highest quality

If you’re in the market for a mainstream gaming card to pair with your 1080p monitor, the AMD Radeon R7 260X is a solid choice that should let you run most recent games at medium to high settings. It’s a particularly good option if you’re planning on building a compact or small-form-factor system, as it’s a short card that uses less power than Nvidia’s alternative, which means it should be quieter and produce less heat. But unless you’re really jazzed about the potential of the nascent TrueAudio or AMD’s leveraging of its console footprint with the Mantle API, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost generally delivers slightly better performance for about the same price—so long as you are willing to wait for that rebate check to arrive in your mailbox.

AMD's Radeon R9 280X is a Radeon 7900-class of card now invested with a new name. Roughly analogous to the HD 7970 GHz Edition in performance, representing the best of the current generation, the prominent feature is the $299 (£230) price, which is (currently) substantially lower than the perf-equivalent GeForce GTX 770 from Nvidia. The new Radeon is powerful enough to play most modern games at a 2,560x1,440 resolution allied to high image quality, and the 3GB framebuffer is ideally suited to running Battlefield 4 at maximum settings. Moving on, the $199 (£150) Radeon R9 270X can legitimately be thought of as an overclocked Radeon HD 7870. The underlying architecture enables decent performance at the usual 1,920x1,080 setting. Nvidia's GTX 760 (£180+) is a little quicker in our benchmarks, intimating that AMD has priced the R9 270X just right. The Radeon R7 260X, meanwhile, is a card suitable for 1,920x1,080 gaming with medium/high image settings in tow. A faster variant of extant Radeon HD 7790 and competitively priced against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti/Boost cards, AMD ensures it has a strong presence at almost all pricing levels. Don't be confused by the new names; these are certainly not true next-generation cards. AMD's using a three-pronged attack of new naming, frequency-modified architecture, and keener pricing to invigorate the mainstream graphics card market for its roster of board partners. The real winner out of this is you, the buyer, because there's simply more in-game performance for every pound spent. Finally, we believe that AMD's Radeon R9 280X, 270X, and R7 260X set new price-to-performance benchmarks and can therefore be recommended, even if, as we've mentioned ad nauseam, the technology is rehashed. Nvidia is likely to counter with a round of price cutting, one would assume, thus making the graphics decision for the next PC upgrade or build even more interesting.

The AMD Radeon R7 260X isn’t faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB, but it wins in some areas and contains unproven features that could change things down the road.

There is very little new about the technology behind the R9 and R7 series of graphics cards. But the price drops alone would be a huge story even if AMD wasn't also rebranding everything to a new naming scheme at the same time. The R9 280X is clearly and without question the best graphics card for $299 and the same is clear for the R9 270X at $199. NVIDIA has no option today that is currently priced to compete with the performance these two cards can now flaunt. AMD is definitely going to get some attention with this release. The R7 260X is just fine and is competitive against the likes of the GTX 650 Ti Boost but loses the performance battle more than it wins it, leaving me much less impressed with the positioning AMD has put it in. At this point I would normally give a product with this much praise our highest awards but there is one issue that prevents me from doing so. The ugly words that AMD hates: frame pacing. AMD still has some work to do to match the multi-GPU scaling capabilities of NVIDIA's GeForce line especially in the fields of Eyefinity and 4K gaming. Single monitor issues have been mostly addressed and once AMD's driver team can release an update for single large surface resolutions then the products being showcased today are going to burst into the spotlight again. As it stands today though, if you know you are a single GPU gamer, or have no plans to go beyond a single panel display configuration, the Radeon R9 280X and R9 270X are the best GPU options I can point you to.

If you're in the market for a video card that is going to be in the low $100 price range, the new R7 260X is a good option. With NVIDIA having the GTX 700 series, most people will feel that buying a GTX 600 based product is just buying old technology. If NVIDIA had GTX 700 series card in this price bracket, the fight would look a little different. The bottom line is that NVIDIA don't, though, and people are going to prefer saying they own a R7 based card verse a last generation GTX 600 series based product. AMD seem to be looking pretty good at the moment with what they've done. Considering how plagued the HD 7700 series was at launch when it came to being extremely overpriced, they have instead seemed to hit at a strong price point this time around. As the HD 7700 series continued to get price cuts, the product saw better and better value over time - first impressions last, though, and you can't deny it was always an uphill battle for those HD 7700 series cards. The first piece to quite a large puzzle from AMD is looking good at this point. As we not only get to see more and more models under the new naming scheme, but also more and more games and applications that can make use of the technology that AMD has on offer, the video cards are only going to become better and better over time.

Getting to the results we find that on average the Radeon R9 270X was 6% faster than the Radeon HD 7870, since its core is overclocked by 5% with 17% faster memory this makes sense. The Radeon R7 260X did slightly better when compared to its rebadged part the Radeon HD 7790 as it was on average 9% faster. That said the core was clocked 10% higher with an 8% faster memory frequency. Compared to Nvidia’s offerings, the Radeon R9 270X faces the GeForce GTX 660 ($200), the R9 270X will be around $20 more than most GTX 660 cards. Still the Radeon R9 270X was on average 18% faster. Then we have the Radeon R7 260X which is said to cost $140, placing it in direct competition with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, a card that is ~10% slower. While this does help to strengthen AMD’s position against Nvidia’s in the sub-$200 market we expect Nvidia to cut prices of competing cards next month. Finally, we have the issue of the new naming scheme which normally we wouldn’t get too caught up with, except for the fact that AMD thought it wise to implement a radically different naming scheme on a run of rebadging. With the absence of the R9 290X the most significant change that has come with the new RX 200 series thus far is the naming scheme. Of course, we still have the Mantle API to explore but with limited information available and Battlefield 4 still yet to be released we don’t have much to go on just yet.

AMD's Radeon R7 260X is pretty much an overclocked HD 7790. It uses the same GPU with higher clock speeds on memory and GPU. A nice surprise is that the chip supports AMD TrueAudio, which makes it the only currently available GPU to support it at this time. Tahiti (R9 280X) and Pitcairn (R9 270X) do not support it. Another surprise is the use of fast 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory, but the R7 260X unfortunately only runs a 1600 MHz memory clock instead of the officially supported 1750 MHz. Gaming performance numbers are around 8% higher than those of the HD 7790, 17% lower than the HD 7850, and 24% behind the GTX 650 Ti Boost. These numbers mean that the R7 260X should only be able to handle full HD 1080p gaming at reasonable detail settings and without anti-aliasing, at least in most cases. Some of the more demanding titles will also require you to run lower details. AMD's reference design cooler seems a little weak for the heat the R7 260X generates—the card runs a bit hot and the fan works extra hard to keep up. A card of this performance class should not be as noisy as the 2.5x faster GTX Titan! While the AMD cooler disappoints, I'm confident that board partners will soon release custom cards with better heatsinks that should alleviate this issue.

The R7 260X isn’t beyond saving. It actually has plenty of redeeming features and provides good performance metrics but competition from NVIDIA and AMD’s own stable drags appeal downwards. While taking an axe to that $139 price may be painful, that’s really the only option right now or AMD will run the very real risk of marginalizing a brand new product.