AMD Radeon R9 270 Pro Reviews

Good for HD gaming, but struggled to play Crysis 3 at the highest quality settings

The R9 270 is an excellent little graphics card that provides an enviable combination of low price with good framerates along with a free copy of Battlefield 4. In a head to head battle against the GTX 660, it is a clear winner but with a mere $20 of separation between it and the R9 270X, most gamers would be better off buying its more capable sibling and ignoring the R9 270 altogether.

AMD's Radeon R9 270 doesn't break any value barriers like the R9 280X did. But it remains a solid value proposition with less strenuous power supply requirements than before. Barring a significant price drop on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660, we might expect the Radeon R9 270 to secure a spot in our monthly Best Gaming Graphics Cards for the Money guide.

The free game bundles aside, the Radeon R9 270 is an aggressive performer for its $179 asking price, outpacing Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 and lower-priced GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, while staying close enough to the GTX 760 to make us wonder if that card’s $249 price is due for a bit of a dip.If you’re looking for the kind of performance the GTX 760 offers at a discount, though, we’d spend the extra $20 and step up to the Radeon R9 270X, which mostly ties that Nvidia card and still costs $50 less than Nvidia’s asking price (at the time we wrote this, in mid-November 2013). On the other hand, if you just want to game at 1080p at high settings on the cheap, the Radeon R9 270 is a better bet than the $150 GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, which couldn’t deliver smooth frame rates at that resolution on all our tests, some of which aren’t cutting-edge anymore. The other factor to consider when deciding between an R9 or a GTX card is how much their respective gaming bundles matter to you. If you opt for a recent AMD card above the R7 260X, you’ll get a copy of Battlefield 4. Meanwhile, you’d have to spend $70 more to step up to the more powerful GTX 760 from the R9 270, but doing so would land you copies of the new Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell titles, along with a $50 voucher off of the company’s Android-powered Shield portable console, in the off-chance you happened to be interested in buying it. Even if you have no plans to pick up the Shield, if you’re interested in the two free titles Nvidia is offering, they go a long way toward bridging the price gap.