AMD’s GTX 760 Killer? MSI Radeon R9 285 Twin Frozr IV Review

Given the sheer number of titles in the Assassin’s Creed series, it’s a little hard to believe that the first game came out a mere six years ago. You could definitely say that Ubisoft hit the ball out of the park with this one. To date, we’ve never considered an AC game for benchmarking, but given the number of graphical goodies featured in the PC version of Black Flag, that trend now ends.

Manual Run-through: The saved game starts us not far from the beginning of the game under a small church which can be climbed to synchronize with the environment. To kick things off, I scale this church and rotate the camera around once, making sure to take in the beautiful landscape; then, I climb back down and run all the way to the water (the top of this small church and the water can be seen in the above screenshot).

Note: For some reason, Ubisoft decided to cap the framerate to 60 FPS in Black Flag even if Vsync is turned off. For most games, this would ruin the chance of it appearing in our benchmarking, but because the game is graphically intensive, I’ve chosen to stick with it, as at higher resolutions, reaching 60 FPS is a perk that will belong only to high-end graphics cards.

All five of the graphics cards we tested here can handle AC IV: Black Flag without issue at 1080p and max detail, but once 1440p is brought in, it separates the men from the boys. Well, kind of – they all still perform quite well. Interestingly, it’s an AMD card that tops the chart here, with the R9 285 sitting in the middle – and considerably ahead of the R9 280 from Sapphire that I took a look at a month-and-a-half ago (but used older drivers for the sake of better comparison against the GTX 760).

Battlefield 4

Thanks to the fact that DICE cares more about PC gaming than a lot of developers, the Battlefield series tends to give us titles that are well-worth benchmarking. Battlefield 3 offered incredible graphics and became a de facto benchmark immediately, so it’s no surprise, then, that BF4 follows right in its footsteps.

Manual Run-through: The Singapore level is the target here, with the saved game starting us on an airboat that must be driven to shore, where a massive battle is set to take place. I stop recording the framerate once the tank makes its way to the end of this small patch of beach; in all, the run takes about 3 minutes.

At both resolutions, AMD’s R9 285 pushes past NVIDIA’s GTX 760 a wee bit, and it basically matches the R9 280 perfectly.