ASUS Radeon R9 390X STRIX 8GB Video Card Review

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Battlefield 4

bf4-screenshot

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

bf4-settings

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark with these settings on the Shanghai level. All tests were done with the DirectX 11 API unless noted in the chart.

bf4-cpu-utilization

Battlefield 4 is more CPU intensive than any other game that we benchmark with as 25% of the CPU is used up during gameplay. You can see that six threads are being used and that the processor is running in Turbo mode at 3.96GHz more times than not.

bf4-4k

Benchmark Results: At 4K Ultra HD settings found that the ASUS Radeon R9 390X STRIX was just a tad slower than the AMD Radeon R9 Nano, but not by too much. The ASUS Radeon R9 390X STRIX was able to play BF4 and averaged just shy of 35 FPS on our benchmark run. When we played the game for about an hour we saw the frame rate dip down to 20 FPS in a couple really tough spots in the game, but had an enjoyable gaming experience.

bf4-4k-time

Benchmark Results: Here is a look at the performance over time you can really see how close the AMD Radeon R9 390X and AMD Radeon R9 Nano are!