AMD Targets NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 960 With New Radeon R9 380X Graphics Card

It’s been a solid five months since AMD last released a non-Fury Radeon GPU, and for a number of reasons, its new R9 380X comes at just the right time. A big reason for that is that we’re in the midst of an extremely busy game release season, and at ~$229, this card falls into what’s arguably the best bang-for-the-buck price point. It also happens to be AMD’s latest answer to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 960, a card that hovers around the same price point.

Given what we’ve seen from AMD’s previous 300-series cards, there’s not too much to be surprised by here. The R9 380X is quite similar to the 280X, with 2,048 cores, 128 texture units, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit memory interface. The 380X bests its predecessor with a much faster clock speed (≥970MHz), and thus much improved performance, as well as a much lower TDP (190W vs. 250W).

According to AMD, if the GTX 960 hits ~1.60x performance based on 3DMark’s Fire Strike test, its new R9 380x hits just over 2.00x. That’s not something NVIDIA will like too much, and I have a feeling that an answer in the form of a GTX 960 Ti isn’t going to be that far out.

AMD’s R9 380X hit our lab as we were in the midst of overhauling our test platform, so you can expect our in-depth look at some point next week. Fortunately, this is a pretty straight-forward launch, and what we can tell you is that more often than not, the R9 380X will in fact best the GTX 960 – usually around 10%.

While numerous vendors will be releasing their own take on the R9 380X, the one we received is ASUS’ STRIX variant. This marks the fourth STRIX card we’ve received, and you’ll hear no complaints from me – I love what ASUS is doing with this series.

Other cards you can expect to see at etail include GIGABYTE’s R9 380X Gaming 4GD, HIS’ R9 380X IceQ X2, PowerColor’s PCS+ R9 380X Myst Edition, VTX3D’s Radeon R9 380X, Sapphire’s Nitro R9 380X, and VFX’s R9 380X DD.

As with AMD’s other recent cards, the R9 380X supports DirectX 12, Vulcan, and Mantle, as well as FreeSync, frame rate target control, and virtual super resolution. It’ll also of course support all of what will come with AMD’s upcoming Crimson driver, which should be due out in the weeks ahead (and should be worth that wait, based on what we’ve seen so far.)

At the time of writing, no R9 380X cards seem to be available at etail, but those should hit soon. AMD says that reference models will be priced at $229, while clock-boosted variants will add at least $10.